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carolinehayter

Gab: hack gives unprecedented look into platform used by far right | The far right | Th... - 0 views

  • 61A data breach at the fringe social media site Gab has for the first time offered a picture of the user base and inner workings of a platform that has been opaque about its operation.
  • The user lists appear to mark 500 accounts, including neo-Nazis, QAnon influencers, cryptocurrency advocates and conspiracy theorists, as investors. They also appear to give an overview of verified users of the platform, including prominent rightwing commentators and activists. And they mark hundreds of active users on the site as “automated”, appearing to indicate administrators knew the accounts were bots but let them continue on the platform regardless.
  • showing the entrepreneur seeking direct feedback on site design from a member of a group that promotes a “spiderweb of rightwing internet conspiracy theories with antisemitic and anti-LGBTQ elements”, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
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  • On Monday, the platform went dark after a hacker took over the accounts of 178 users, including Torba and the Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene.
  • Gab, a Twitter-like website promoted by Torba as a bastion of free speech, has long been a forum of last resort for extremists and conspiracy theorists who have been banned on other online platforms. It attained worldwide notoriety in 2018 when a user, Robert Bowers, wrote on the site that he was “going in”, shortly before allegedly entering the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and killing eleven people.
  • The 2017 share offering, for example, required a minimum investment of $199.10, and rewarded investors who contributed a greater amount with “perks”. Users who invested $200 could display a “Gab investor badge” on the site. The badges corresponded with a tag in the database, which allowed investors to be looked at in detail.
  • The leaked files contained what appears to be a database of over 4.1 million registered users on the site and tags identifying subscribers as “investors”, “verified” users and “pro” users.
  • Some of the people associated with investors’ accounts had high-profile jobs and public roles, while spewing hate and extremist beliefs online.
  • The data breach also appears to offer some insight into users tagged as “verified” by Gab, which according to the platform’s own explanation means that they have completed a verification process that includes matching their display name to a government ID.
  • And it appears to include a list of users registered as “pros”, which allows users to access additional features and a badge at a price starting at $99 year. The database indicates over 18,000 users had paid to be pro users at the time of the breach. Nearly 4,000 users were flagged as donors to Gab’s repeated attempts to attract voluntary gifts from users.
  • Direct messages included in the leak appear to show close communication between Torba and a major QAnon influencer who is labeled a Gab investor, seemingly reinforcing the CEO’s public efforts to make Gab a home for adherents to the QAnon conspiracy theory, which helped fuel the 6 January attack on the nation’s Capitol.
  • According to Wired, the data exposed in the apparent hack was sourced by a hacker who had found a security vulnerability in the site.
  • “Gab was negligent at best and malicious at worst” in its approach to security, she added. “It is hard to envision a scenario where a company cared less about user data than this one.”
katherineharron

More than 95 million Americans have voted with one day to go until Election Day - CNNPo... - 0 views

  • More than 95 million Americans have voted nationwide with one day left until Election Day, according to a survey of election officials by CNN, Edison Research and Catalist.   
  • Eighteen states and Washington, DC, have seen more than half of their registered voters cast ballots already.
  • Nationwide, the 95.5 million ballots already cast represents 70% of the more than 136.5 million ballots cast in the 2016 presidential election.  
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  • A significant majority of ballots cast so far in Pennsylvania -- 82% -- come from White voters. Black voters make up the second largest share of those early ballots at 11%, followed by Hispanic voters at 4% and Asian voters at 3%.
  • President Donald Trump, former Vice President Joe Biden, Vice President Mike Pence, and Sen. Kamala Harris will all appear in Pennsylvania at some point today.
  • More than 14 million ballots have already been cast in these five states, which could be crucial in determining the next president.
  • It's no coincidence that all the candidates are stopping in Pennsylvania today. There are a lot of voters who still have not cast a ballot in the state that was the lynchpin to Trump's 2016 victory.
  • Democrats have dominated the pre-election vote in the Keystone State. They currently make up 66% of those ballots.
  • Polling shows Republicans nationwide strongly prefer to vote in person on Election Day, which the Trump campaign thinks will be enough to recapture the state's 20 electoral votes.
  • At 83% of early voters so far, White voters make up a smaller share of the early voting electorate compared to the 88% they were at this point in 2016
  • So far, 13% of Pennsylvania's early voters are under 30, and 38% are 65 or older. More younger voters have been casting ballots in Pennsylvania as the campaign comes to a close. Last week, 11% of the commonwealth's voters were under 30, and 42% were 65 or older.
  • Texas and Hawaii have already surpassed their total turnout from the 2016 general election. In eight more states, the pre-election vote represents at least 90% of their 2016 total vote -- Montana, Washington, North Carolina, Georgia, Nevada, Florida, New Mexico and Tennessee.
  • Democrats hold a smaller lead over Republicans in pre-election ballots cast than they did on the day before the 2016 election. Back then, they had an eight-point lead. Currently, it's six points, with Democrats at 37% and Republicans at 31%.
  • Younger voters make up a larger share of North Carolina's early voters this year than at this point in 2016. Fifteen percent of the state's early voters so far are under 30, almost double the 8% at this time four years ago. That number continues to grow. One week ago, voters under 30 made up 12% of North Carolina's early voters.
  • Almost 56% of ballots already cast come from women in the Tar Heel State, and men comprise about 44%. This is roughly on par with the gender breakdown at this point in 2016.
  • Republicans want to hang onto Michigan's 16 electoral votes, while Democrats are working to bring the state back into the fold.
  • Black voters have expanded their share of pre-Election Day ballots cast from about 9% at this time in 2016 to 12% currently.
  • Women in Pennsylvania account for nearly 57% of ballots already cast, and men account for about 43%.
  • Slightly more than 56% of ballots cast so far in the Wolverine State are from women and almost 44% are from men.
  • Wisconsin has seen a large decrease in the share of early votes from people 65 or older, but the state hasn't seen as much of an increase from voters under 30.
  • By race, Wisconsin's early voters are similar to that of four years ago, with White voters representing the vast majority -- about 88% -- of those who've cast their ballots so far. Black voters represent about 5% of those early voters, Hispanic voters 3% and Asian voters 2% -- all on par with this time in 2016.
  • The racial breakdown of Ohio's early voters is almost identical to this time in 2016. Eighty-six percent of ballots already cast have come from White voters. Black voters comprise about 11% of those early ballots, with Hispanic voters accounting for about 2% and Asian voters about 1%. Younger Ohioans have increased their share of the early vote from 7% at this point in 2016 to about 12% now. These voters below the age of 30 have also continued to turn out during the last week of the campaign -- one week ago, they made up 9% of early voters.
Javier E

The GOP Is a Propaganda Party - The Bulwark - 0 views

  • the relationship between what’s loosely defined as “conservative media” and the GOP.
  • For a long time, most influential right-leaning media figures were content to swim alongside the GOP, flowing along in the same general direction. Until Donald Trump came along. Then they saw an opportunity to burrow deep inside the GOP and wield real power.
  • It worked. So well that the GOP, as an institution, no longer controls its tongue and its craven media parasites are the only thing keeping it alive.
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  • beyond and before Fox, the media—news, talk, and entertainment—always have been and always will be Trump’s source of political strength. That will only become more true after he leaves office. He will continue to seek out ratings, somewhere, as sustenance for relevance and survival.
  • It’s the Fox News primetime lineup, the large galaxy of radio and digital outlets clamoring to place their personalities and stories on Fox News, and their vast array of fringy lower-tier knockoffs.
  • All day, every day, these talkers, writers, producers, and editors set the party agenda. They act as the Republican party’s “war room.” They give favored politicians airtime to solicit donations from their viewers. They go negative on their political enemies. Their stars even headline campaign events to rev up the base and get out the vote.
  • The ones who are good at it get paid far more by the likes of the Murdoch and the Mercer families to carry out the political agenda than any mere senator or congressman. These talkers, not the elected officials stuck grubbing around shaking hands and campaigning in the streets, are the party’s real leaders.
  • Donald Trump is almost an afterthought in this context
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  • Long before he announced his candidacy in 2015, Fox primed the GOP base for a candidate like him; the network gave him more airtime than other candidates, including a longstanding call-in segment on Fox & Friends; no one blinked an eye when Fox head Roger Ailes, who had a quarter-century friendship with Trump, began advising the Trump campaign
  • “Who are the actual leaders of the GOP?” Who truly influences Republican voters?
  • Knowing this dynamic within the GOP, it’s no wonder that (to name just one ambitious pol) Sen. Ted Cruz has adopted the posture of an online Twitter troll instead of the constitutional scholar-turned-statesman of the biggest, most Republican state in the union.
  • The demands of leading and governing in the public interest have never meshed well with the demands of winning and keeping office, but they have never before been so contradictory.
  • Propaganda Party rules dictate that “owning the libz” and generating likes, retweets, and reactions online are the key to success. In the absence of any policy platform, a new party operating philosophy has emerged among politicians and media figures alike: present Trump-friendly figures in the best light possible and depict anyone who stands in their way as some variation of a socialist, child-eating, Satan worshipper.
  • Plenty of deep-pocketed investors are down for it; they’re looking to fund more media that will do exactly this.
  • Ben Smith found a healthy appetite among media investors eager to “convert Mr. Trump’s political profile into cash”:
  • it’s a much better bang for their buck than funding candidates or ads. It sure beats abiding by pesky campaign finance rules, too.
  • The prospect that Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram might enforce rules to bar politicians from dumping disinformation online is probably the biggest threat to their political model.
  • people like Ruddy and the talk radio personalities and the Fox primetime hosts have only one primary function now: Keep Trump’s GOP alive, no matter what. They feed themselves and feed the political machine at once. And, without them, the GOP in its current form will wither and die.
  • The propaganda is the party and the party is propaganda. Sink or swim.
Javier E

Facebook Papers: 'History Will Not Judge Us Kindly' - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Facebook’s hypocrisies, and its hunger for power and market domination, are not secret. Nor is the company’s conflation of free speech and algorithmic amplification
  • But the events of January 6 proved for many people—including many in Facebook’s workforce—to be a breaking point.
  • these documents leave little room for doubt about Facebook’s crucial role in advancing the cause of authoritarianism in America and around the world. Authoritarianism predates the rise of Facebook, of course. But Facebook makes it much easier for authoritarians to win.
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  • Again and again, the Facebook Papers show staffers sounding alarms about the dangers posed by the platform—how Facebook amplifies extremism and misinformation, how it incites violence, how it encourages radicalization and political polarization. Again and again, staffers reckon with the ways in which Facebook’s decisions stoke these harms, and they plead with leadership to do more.
  • And again and again, staffers say, Facebook’s leaders ignore them.
  • Facebook has dismissed the concerns of its employees in manifold ways.
  • One of its cleverer tactics is to argue that staffers who have raised the alarm about the damage done by their employer are simply enjoying Facebook’s “very open culture,” in which people are encouraged to share their opinions, a spokesperson told me. This stance allows Facebook to claim transparency while ignoring the substance of the complaints, and the implication of the complaints: that many of Facebook’s employees believe their company operates without a moral compass.
  • When you stitch together the stories that spanned the period between Joe Biden’s election and his inauguration, it’s easy to see Facebook as instrumental to the attack on January 6. (A spokesperson told me that the notion that Facebook played an instrumental role in the insurrection is “absurd.”)
  • what emerges from a close reading of Facebook documents, and observation of the manner in which the company connects large groups of people quickly, is that Facebook isn’t a passive tool but a catalyst. Had the organizers tried to plan the rally using other technologies of earlier eras, such as telephones, they would have had to identify and reach out individually to each prospective participant, then persuade them to travel to Washington. Facebook made people’s efforts at coordination highly visible on a global scale.
  • The platform not only helped them recruit participants but offered people a sense of strength in numbers. Facebook proved to be the perfect hype machine for the coup-inclined.
  • In November 2019, Facebook staffers noticed they had a serious problem. Facebook offers a collection of one-tap emoji reactions. Today, they include “like,” “love,” “care,” “haha,” “wow,” “sad,” and “angry.” Company researchers had found that the posts dominated by “angry” reactions were substantially more likely to go against community standards, including prohibitions on various types of misinformation, according to internal documents.
  • In July 2020, researchers presented the findings of a series of experiments. At the time, Facebook was already weighting the reactions other than “like” more heavily in its algorithm—meaning posts that got an “angry” reaction were more likely to show up in users’ News Feeds than posts that simply got a “like.” Anger-inducing content didn’t spread just because people were more likely to share things that made them angry; the algorithm gave anger-inducing content an edge. Facebook’s Integrity workers—employees tasked with tackling problems such as misinformation and espionage on the platform—concluded that they had good reason to believe targeting posts that induced anger would help stop the spread of harmful content.
  • By dialing anger’s weight back to zero in the algorithm, the researchers found, they could keep posts to which people reacted angrily from being viewed by as many users. That, in turn, translated to a significant (up to 5 percent) reduction in the hate speech, civic misinformation, bullying, and violent posts—all of which are correlated with offline violence—to which users were exposed.
  • Facebook rolled out the change in early September 2020, documents show; a Facebook spokesperson confirmed that the change has remained in effect. It was a real victory for employees of the Integrity team.
  • But it doesn’t normally work out that way. In April 2020, according to Frances Haugen’s filings with the SEC, Facebook employees had recommended tweaking the algorithm so that the News Feed would deprioritize the surfacing of content for people based on their Facebook friends’ behavior. The idea was that a person’s News Feed should be shaped more by people and groups that a person had chosen to follow. Up until that point, if your Facebook friend saw a conspiracy theory and reacted to it, Facebook’s algorithm might show it to you, too. The algorithm treated any engagement in your network as a signal that something was worth sharing. But now Facebook workers wanted to build circuit breakers to slow this form of sharing.
  • Experiments showed that this change would impede the distribution of hateful, polarizing, and violence-inciting content in people’s News Feeds. But Zuckerberg “rejected this intervention that could have reduced the risk of violence in the 2020 election,” Haugen’s SEC filing says. An internal message characterizing Zuckerberg’s reasoning says he wanted to avoid new features that would get in the way of “meaningful social interactions.” But according to Facebook’s definition, its employees say, engagement is considered “meaningful” even when it entails bullying, hate speech, and reshares of harmful content.
  • This episode, like Facebook’s response to the incitement that proliferated between the election and January 6, reflects a fundamental problem with the platform
  • Facebook’s megascale allows the company to influence the speech and thought patterns of billions of people. What the world is seeing now, through the window provided by reams of internal documents, is that Facebook catalogs and studies the harm it inflicts on people. And then it keeps harming people anyway.
  • “I am worried that Mark’s continuing pattern of answering a different question than the question that was asked is a symptom of some larger problem,” wrote one Facebook employee in an internal post in June 2020, referring to Zuckerberg. “I sincerely hope that I am wrong, and I’m still hopeful for progress. But I also fully understand my colleagues who have given up on this company, and I can’t blame them for leaving. Facebook is not neutral, and working here isn’t either.”
  • It is quite a thing to see, the sheer number of Facebook employees—people who presumably understand their company as well as or better than outside observers—who believe their employer to be morally bankrupt.
  • I spoke with several former Facebook employees who described the company’s metrics-driven culture as extreme, even by Silicon Valley standards
  • Facebook workers are under tremendous pressure to quantitatively demonstrate their individual contributions to the company’s growth goals, they told me. New products and features aren’t approved unless the staffers pitching them demonstrate how they will drive engagement.
  • e worries have been exacerbated lately by fears about a decline in new posts on Facebook, two former employees who left the company in recent years told me. People are posting new material less frequently to Facebook, and its users are on average older than those of other social platforms.
  • One of Facebook’s Integrity staffers wrote at length about this dynamic in a goodbye note to colleagues in August 2020, describing how risks to Facebook users “fester” because of the “asymmetrical” burden placed on employees to “demonstrate legitimacy and user value” before launching any harm-mitigation tactics—a burden not shared by those developing new features or algorithm changes with growth and engagement in mind
  • The note said:We were willing to act only after things had spiraled into a dire state … Personally, during the time that we hesitated, I’ve seen folks from my hometown go further and further down the rabbithole of QAnon and Covid anti-mask/anti-vax conspiracy on FB. It has been painful to observe.
  • Current and former Facebook employees describe the same fundamentally broken culture—one in which effective tactics for making Facebook safer are rolled back by leadership or never approved in the first place.
  • That broken culture has produced a broken platform: an algorithmic ecosystem in which users are pushed toward ever more extreme content, and where Facebook knowingly exposes its users to conspiracy theories, disinformation, and incitement to violence.
  • One example is a program that amounts to a whitelist for VIPs on Facebook, allowing some of the users most likely to spread misinformation to break Facebook’s rules without facing consequences. Under the program, internal documents show, millions of high-profile users—including politicians—are left alone by Facebook even when they incite violence
  • whitelisting influential users with massive followings on Facebook isn’t just a secret and uneven application of Facebook’s rules; it amounts to “protecting content that is especially likely to deceive, and hence to harm, people on our platforms.”
  • Facebook workers tried and failed to end the program. Only when its existence was reported in September by The Wall Street Journal did Facebook’s Oversight Board ask leadership for more information about the practice. Last week, the board publicly rebuked Facebook for not being “fully forthcoming” about the program.
  • As a result, Facebook has stoked an algorithm arms race within its ranks, pitting core product-and-engineering teams, such as the News Feed team, against their colleagues on Integrity teams, who are tasked with mitigating harm on the platform. These teams establish goals that are often in direct conflict with each other.
  • “We can’t pretend we don’t see information consumption patterns, and how deeply problematic they are for the longevity of democratic discourse,” a user-experience researcher wrote in an internal comment thread in 2019, in response to a now-infamous memo from Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, a longtime Facebook executive. “There is no neutral position at this stage, it would be powerfully immoral to commit to amorality.”
  • Zuckerberg has defined Facebook’s mission as making “social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that works for all of us,” but in internal research documents his employees point out that communities aren’t always good for society:
  • When part of a community, individuals typically act in a prosocial manner. They conform, they forge alliances, they cooperate, they organize, they display loyalty, they expect obedience, they share information, they influence others, and so on. Being in a group changes their behavior, their abilities, and, importantly, their capability to harm themselves or others
  • Thus, when people come together and form communities around harmful topics or identities, the potential for harm can be greater.
  • The infrastructure choices that Facebook is making to keep its platform relevant are driving down the quality of the site, and exposing its users to more dangers
  • hose dangers are also unevenly distributed, because of the manner in which certain subpopulations are algorithmically ushered toward like-minded groups
  • And the subpopulations of Facebook users who are most exposed to dangerous content are also most likely to be in groups where it won’t get reported.
  • And it knows that 3 percent of Facebook users in the United States are super-consumers of conspiracy theories, accounting for 37 percent of known consumption of misinformation on the platform.
  • Zuckerberg’s positioning of Facebook’s role in the insurrection is odd. He lumps his company in with traditional media organizations—something he’s ordinarily loath to do, lest the platform be expected to take more responsibility for the quality of the content that appears on it—and suggests that Facebook did more, and did better, than journalism outlets in its response to January 6. What he fails to say is that journalism outlets would never be in the position to help investigators this way, because insurrectionists don’t typically use newspapers and magazines to recruit people for coups.
  • Facebook wants people to believe that the public must choose between Facebook as it is, on the one hand, and free speech, on the other. This is a false choice. Facebook has a sophisticated understanding of measures it could take to make its platform safer without resorting to broad or ideologically driven censorship tactics.
  • Facebook knows that no two people see the same version of the platform, and that certain subpopulations experience far more dangerous versions than others do
  • Facebook knows that people who are isolated—recently widowed or divorced, say, or geographically distant from loved ones—are disproportionately at risk of being exposed to harmful content on the platform.
  • It knows that repeat offenders are disproportionately responsible for spreading misinformation.
  • All of this makes the platform rely more heavily on ways it can manipulate what its users see in order to reach its goals. This explains why Facebook is so dependent on the infrastructure of groups, as well as making reshares highly visible, to keep people hooked.
  • It could consistently enforce its policies regardless of a user’s political power.
  • Facebook could ban reshares.
  • It could choose to optimize its platform for safety and quality rather than for growth.
  • It could tweak its algorithm to prevent widespread distribution of harmful content.
  • Facebook could create a transparent dashboard so that all of its users can see what’s going viral in real time.
  • It could make public its rules for how frequently groups can post and how quickly they can grow.
  • It could also automatically throttle groups when they’re growing too fast, and cap the rate of virality for content that’s spreading too quickly.
  • Facebook could shift the burden of proof toward people and communities to demonstrate that they’re good actors—and treat reach as a privilege, not a right
  • You must be vigilant about the informational streams you swim in, deliberate about how you spend your precious attention, unforgiving of those who weaponize your emotions and cognition for their own profit, and deeply untrusting of any scenario in which you’re surrounded by a mob of people who agree with everything you’re saying.
  • It could do all of these things. But it doesn’t.
  • Lately, people have been debating just how nefarious Facebook really is. One argument goes something like this: Facebook’s algorithms aren’t magic, its ad targeting isn’t even that good, and most people aren’t that stupid.
  • All of this may be true, but that shouldn’t be reassuring. An algorithm may just be a big dumb means to an end, a clunky way of maneuvering a massive, dynamic network toward a desired outcome. But Facebook’s enormous size gives it tremendous, unstable power.
  • Facebook takes whole populations of people, pushes them toward radicalism, and then steers the radicalized toward one another.
  • When the most powerful company in the world possesses an instrument for manipulating billions of people—an instrument that only it can control, and that its own employees say is badly broken and dangerous—we should take notice.
  • The lesson for individuals is this:
  • Facebook could say that its platform is not for everyone. It could sound an alarm for those who wander into the most dangerous corners of Facebook, and those who encounter disproportionately high levels of harmful content
  • Without seeing how Facebook works at a finer resolution, in real time, we won’t be able to understand how to make the social web compatible with democracy.
Javier E

Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change - The New York Times - 0 views

  • As Malcolm Forbes Baldwin, the acting chairman of the president’s Council for Environmental Quality, told industry executives in 1981, “There can be no more important or conservative concern than the protection of the globe itself.”
  • Among those who called for urgent, immediate and far-reaching climate policy were Senators John Chafee, Robert Stafford and David Durenberger; the E.P.A. administrator, William K. Reilly; and, during his campaign for president, George H.W. Bush.
  • It was understood that action would have to come immediately. At the start of the 1980s, scientists within the federal government predicted that conclusive evidence of warming would appear on the global temperature record by the end of the decade, at which point it would be too late to avoid disaster.
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  • If the world had adopted the proposal widely endorsed at the end of the ’80s — a freezing of carbon emissions, with a reduction of 20 percent by 2005 — warming could have been held to less than 1.5 degrees.
  • Action had to be taken, and the United States would need to lead. It didn’t.
  • There can be no understanding of our current and future predicament without understanding why we failed to solve this problem when we had the chance.
  • The first suggestion to Rafe Pomerance that humankind was destroying the conditions necessary for its own survival came on Page 66 of the government publication EPA-600/7-78-019. It was a technical report about coal
  • ‘This Is the Whole Banana’ Spring 1979
  • here was an urgent problem that demanded their attention, MacDonald believed, because human civilization faced an existential crisis. In “How to Wreck the Environment,” a 1968 essay published while he was a science adviser to Lyndon Johnson, MacDonald predicted a near future in which “nuclear weapons were effectively banned and the weapons of mass destruction were those of environmental catastrophe.” One of the most potentially devastating such weapons, he believed, was the gas that we exhaled with every breath: carbon dioxide. By vastly increasing carbon emissions, the world’s most advanced militaries could alter weather patterns and wreak famine, drought and economic collapse.
  • the Jasons. They were like one of those teams of superheroes with complementary powers that join forces in times of galactic crisis. They had been brought together by federal agencies, including the C.I.A, to devise scientific solutions to national-security problems: how to detect an incoming missile; how to predict fallout from a nuclear bomb; how to develop unconventional weapons, like plague-infested rats.
  • Agle pointed to an article about a prominent geophysicist named Gordon MacDonald, who was conducting a study on climate change with the Jasons, the mysterious coterie of elite scientists to which he belonged
  • During the spring of 1977 and the summer of 1978, the Jasons met to determine what would happen once the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere doubled from pre-Industrial Revolution levels. It was an arbitrary milestone, the doubling, but a useful one, as its inevitability was not in question; the threshold would most likely be breached by 2035.
  • The Jasons’ report to the Department of Energy, “The Long-Term Impact of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide on Climate,” was written in an understated tone that only enhanced its nightmarish findings: Global temperatures would increase by an average of two to three degrees Celsius; Dust Bowl conditions would “threaten large areas of North America, Asia and Africa”; access to drinking water and agricultural production would fall, triggering mass migration on an unprecedented scale. “Perhaps the most ominous feature,” however, was the effect of a changing climate on the poles. Even a minimal warming “could lead to rapid melting” of the West Antarctic ice sheet. The ice sheet contained enough water to raise the level of the oceans 16 feet.
  • MacDonald explained that he first studied the carbon-dioxide issue when he was about Pomerance’s age — in 1961, when he served as an adviser to John F. Kennedy. Pomerance pieced together that MacDonald, in his youth, had been something of a prodigy: In his 20s, he advised Dwight D. Eisenhower on space exploration; at 32, he became a member of the National Academy of Sciences; at 40, he was appointed to the inaugural Council on Environmental Quality, where he advised Richard Nixon on the environmental dangers of burning coal. He monitored the carbon-dioxide problem the whole time, with increasing alarm.
  • They were surprised to learn how few senior officials were familiar with the Jasons’ findings, let alone understood the ramifications of global warming. At last, having worked their way up the federal hierarchy, the two went to see the president’s top scientist, Frank Press.
  • Thus began the Gordon and Rafe carbon-dioxide roadshow. Beginning in the spring of 1979, Pomerance arranged informal briefings with the E.P.A., the National Security Council, The New York Times, the Council on Environmental Quality and the Energy Department, which, Pomerance learned, had established an Office of Carbon Dioxide Effects two years earlier at MacDonald’s urging
  • . Out of respect for MacDonald, Press had summoned to their meeting what seemed to be the entire senior staff of the president’s Office of Science and Technology Policy — the officials consulted on every critical matter of energy and national security. What Pomerance had expected to be yet another casual briefing assumed the character of a high-level national-security meeting.
  • MacDonald would begin his presentation by going back more than a century to John Tyndall — an Irish physicist who was an early champion of Charles Darwin’s work and died after being accidentally poisoned by his wife. In 1859, Tyndall found that carbon dioxide absorbed heat and that variations in the composition of the atmosphere could create changes in climate. These findings inspired Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish chemist and future Nobel laureate, to deduce in 1896 that the combustion of coal and petroleum could raise global temperatures. This warming would become noticeable in a few centuries, Arrhenius calculated, or sooner if consumption of fossil fuels continued to increase.
  • Four decades later, a British steam engineer named Guy Stewart Callendar discovered that, at the weather stations he observed, the previous five years were the hottest in recorded history. Humankind, he wrote in a paper, had become “able to speed up the processes of Nature.” That was in 1939.
  • MacDonald’s history concluded with Roger Revelle, perhaps the most distinguished of the priestly caste of government scientists who, since the Manhattan Project, advised every president on major policy; he had been a close colleague of MacDonald and Press since they served together under Kennedy. In a 1957 paper written with Hans Suess, Revelle concluded that “human beings are now carrying out a large-scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future.” Revelle helped the Weather Bureau establish a continuous measurement of atmospheric carbon dioxide at a site perched near the summit of Mauna Loa on the Big Island of Hawaii, 11,500 feet above the sea — a rare pristine natural laboratory on a planet blanketed by fossil-fuel emissions.
  • After nearly a decade of observation, Revelle had shared his concerns with Lyndon Johnson, who included them in a special message to Congress two weeks after his inauguration. Johnson explained that his generation had “altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale” through the burning of fossil fuels, and his administration commissioned a study of the subject by his Science Advisory Committee. Revelle was its chairman, and its 1965 executive report on carbon dioxide warned of the rapid melting of Antarctica, rising seas, increased acidity of fresh waters — changes that would require no less than a coordinated global effort to forestall.Yet emissions continued to rise, and at this rate, MacDonald warned, they could see a snowless New England, the swamping of major coastal cities, as much as a 40 percent decline in national wheat production, the forced migration of about one-quarter of the world’s population. Not within centuries — within their own lifetimes.
  • On May 22, Press wrote a letter to the president of the National Academy of Sciences requesting a full assessment of the carbon-dioxide issue. Jule Charney, the father of modern meteorology, would gather the nation’s top oceanographers, atmospheric scientists and climate modelers to judge whether MacDonald’s alarm was justified — whether the world was, in fact, headed to cataclysm.
  • If Charney’s group confirmed that the world was careering toward an existential crisis, the president would be forced to act.
  • Hansen turned from the moon to Venus. Why, he tried to determine, was its surface so hot? In 1967, a Soviet satellite beamed back the answer: The planet’s atmosphere was mainly carbon dioxide. Though once it may have had habitable temperatures, it was believed to have succumbed to a runaway greenhouse effect: As the sun grew brighter, Venus’s ocean began to evaporate, thickening the atmosphere, which forced yet greater evaporation — a self-perpetuating cycle that finally boiled off the ocean entirely and heated the planet’s surface to more than 800 degrees Fahrenheit
  • At the other extreme, Mars’s thin atmosphere had insufficient carbon dioxide to trap much heat at all, leaving it about 900 degrees colder. Earth lay in the middle, its Goldilocks greenhouse effect just strong enough to support life.
  • We want to learn more about Earth’s climate, Jim told Anniek — and how humanity can influence it. He would use giant new supercomputers to map the planet’s atmosphere. They would create Mirror Worlds: parallel realities that mimicked our own. These digital simulacra, technically called “general circulation models,” combined the mathematical formulas that governed the behavior of the sea, land and sky into a single computer model. Unlike the real world, they could be sped forward to reveal the future.
  • The government officials, many of them scientists themselves, tried to suppress their awe of the legends in their presence: Henry Stommel, the world’s leading oceanographer; his protégé, Carl Wunsch, a Jason; the Manhattan Project alumnus Cecil Leith; the Harvard planetary physicist Richard Goody. These were the men who, in the last three decades, had discovered foundational principles underlying the relationships among sun, atmosphere, land and ocean — which is to say, the climate.
  • When, at Charney’s request, Hansen programmed his model to consider a future of doubled carbon dioxide, it predicted a temperature increase of four degrees Celsius. That was twice as much warming as the prediction made by the most prominent climate modeler, Syukuro Manabe, whose government lab at Princeton was the first to model the greenhouse effect. The difference between the two predictions — between warming of two degrees Celsius and four degrees Celsius — was the difference between damaged coral reefs and no reefs whatsoever, between thinning forests and forests enveloped by desert, between catastrophe and chaos.
  • The discrepancy between the models, Arakawa concluded, came down to ice and snow. The whiteness of the world’s snowfields reflected light; if snow melted in a warmer climate, less radiation would escape the atmosphere, leading to even greater warming. Shortly before dawn, Arakawa concluded that Manabe had given too little weight to the influence of melting sea ice, while Hansen had overemphasized it. The best estimate lay in between. Which meant that the Jasons’ calculation was too optimistic. When carbon dioxide doubled in 2035 or thereabouts, global temperatures would increase between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees Celsius, with the most likely outcome a warming of three degrees.
  • within the highest levels of the federal government, the scientific community and the oil-and-gas industry — within the commonwealth of people who had begun to concern themselves with the future habitability of the planet — the Charney report would come to have the authority of settled fact. It was the summation of all the predictions that had come before, and it would withstand the scrutiny of the decades that followed it. Charney’s group had considered everything known about ocean, sun, sea, air and fossil fuels and had distilled it to a single number: three. When the doubling threshold was broached, as appeared inevitable, the world would warm three degrees Celsius
  • The last time the world was three degrees warmer was during the Pliocene, three million years ago, when beech trees grew in Antarctica, the seas were 80 feet higher and horses galloped across the Canadian coast of the Arctic Ocean.
  • After the publication of the Charney report, Exxon decided to create its own dedicated carbon-dioxide research program, with an annual budget of $600,000. Only Exxon was asking a slightly different question than Jule Charney. Exxon didn’t concern itself primarily with how much the world would warm. It wanted to know how much of the warming Exxon could be blamed for.
  • “It behooves us to start a very aggressive defensive program,” Shaw wrote in a memo to a manager, “because there is a good probability that legislation affecting our business will be passed.”
  • Shaw turned to Wallace Broecker, a Columbia University oceanographer who was the second author of Roger Revelle’s 1965 carbon-dioxide report for Lyndon Johnson. In 1977, in a presentation at the American Geophysical Union, Broecker predicted that fossil fuels would have to be restricted, whether by taxation or fiat. More recently, he had testified before Congress, calling carbon dioxide “the No.1 long-term environmental problem.” If presidents and senators trusted Broecker to tell them the bad news, he was good enough for Exxon.
  • The company had been studying the carbon-dioxide problem for decades, since before it changed its name to Exxon. In 1957, scientists from Humble Oil published a study tracking “the enormous quantity of carbon dioxide” contributed to the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution “from the combustion of fossil fuels.” Even then, the observation that burning fossil fuels had increased the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere was well understood and accepted by Humble’s scientists.
  • The American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s largest trade association, asked the same question in 1958 through its air-pollution study group and replicated the findings made by Humble Oil. So did another A.P.I. study conducted by the Stanford Research Institute a decade later, in 1968, which concluded that the burning of fossil fuels would bring “significant temperature changes” by the year 2000 and ultimately “serious worldwide environmental changes,” including the melting of the Antarctic ice cap and rising seas.
  • The ritual repeated itself every few years. Industry scientists, at the behest of their corporate bosses, reviewed the problem and found good reasons for alarm and better excuses to do nothing. Why should they act when almost nobody within the United States government — nor, for that matter, within the environmental movement — seemed worried?
  • Why take on an intractable problem that would not be detected until this generation of employees was safely retired? Worse, the solutions seemed more punitive than the problem itself. Historically, energy use had correlated to economic growth — the more fossil fuels we burned, the better our lives became. Why mess with that?
  • That June, Jimmy Carter signed the Energy Security Act of 1980, which directed the National Academy of Sciences to start a multiyear, comprehensive study, to be called “Changing Climate,” that would analyze social and economic effects of climate change. More urgent, the National Commission on Air Quality, at the request of Congress, invited two dozen experts, including Henry Shaw himself, to a meeting in Florida to propose climate policy.
  • On April 3, 1980, Senator Paul Tsongas, a Massachusetts Democrat, held the first congressional hearing on carbon-dioxide buildup in the atmosphere. Gordon MacDonald testified that the United States should “take the initiative” and develop, through the United Nations, a way to coordinate every nation’s energy policies to address the problem.
  • During the expansion of the Clean Air Act, he pushed for the creation of the National Commission on Air Quality, charged with ensuring that the goals of the act were being met. One such goal was a stable global climate. The Charney report had made clear that goal was not being met, and now the commission wanted to hear proposals for legislation. It was a profound responsibility, and the two dozen experts invited to the Pink Palace — policy gurus, deep thinkers, an industry scientist and an environmental activist — had only three days to achieve it, but the utopian setting made everything seem possible
  • We have less time than we realize, said an M.I.T. nuclear engineer named David Rose, who studied how civilizations responded to large technological crises. “People leave their problems until the 11th hour, the 59th minute,” he said. “And then: ‘Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani?’ ” — “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
  • The attendees seemed to share a sincere interest in finding solutions. They agreed that some kind of international treaty would ultimately be needed to keep atmospheric carbon dioxide at a safe level. But nobody could agree on what that level was.
  • William Elliott, a NOAA scientist, introduced some hard facts: If the United States stopped burning carbon that year, it would delay the arrival of the doubling threshold by only five years. If Western nations somehow managed to stabilize emissions, it would forestall the inevitable by only eight years. The only way to avoid the worst was to stop burning coal. Yet China, the Soviet Union and the United States, by far the world’s three largest coal producers, were frantically accelerating extraction.
  • “Do we have a problem?” asked Anthony Scoville, a congressional science consultant. “We do, but it is not the atmospheric problem. It is the political problem.” He doubted that any scientific report, no matter how ominous its predictions, would persuade politicians to act.
  • The talk of ending oil production stirred for the first time the gentleman from Exxon. “I think there is a transition period,” Henry Shaw said. “We are not going to stop burning fossil fuels and start looking toward solar or nuclear fusion and so on. We are going to have a very orderly transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources.”
  • What if the problem was that they were thinking of it as a problem? “What I am saying,” Scoville continued, “is that in a sense we are making a transition not only in energy but the economy as a whole.” Even if the coal and oil industries collapsed, renewable technologies like solar energy would take their place. Jimmy Carter was planning to invest $80 billion in synthetic fuel. “My God,” Scoville said, “with $80 billion, you could have a photovoltaics industry going that would obviate the need for synfuels forever!”
  • nobody could agree what to do. John Perry, a meteorologist who had worked as a staff member on the Charney report, suggested that American energy policy merely “take into account” the risks of global warming, though he acknowledged that a nonbinding measure might seem “intolerably stodgy.” “It is so weak,” Pomerance said, the air seeping out of him, “as to not get us anywhere.”
  • Scoville pointed out that the United States was responsible for the largest share of global carbon emissions. But not for long. “If we’re going to exercise leadership,” he said, “the opportunity is now.
  • One way to lead, he proposed, would be to classify carbon dioxide as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act and regulate it as such. This was received by the room like a belch. By Scoville’s logic, every sigh was an act of pollution. Did the science really support such an extreme measure? The Charney report did exactly that, Pomerance said.
  • Slade, the director of the Energy Department’s carbon-dioxide program, considered the lag a saving grace. If changes did not occur for a decade or more, he said, those in the room couldn’t be blamed for failing to prevent them. So what was the problem?
  • “Call it whatever.” Besides, Pomerance added, they didn’t have to ban coal tomorrow. A pair of modest steps could be taken immediately to show the world that the United States was serious: the implementation of a carbon tax and increased investment in renewable energy. Then the United States could organize an international summit meeting to address climate change
  • these two dozen experts, who agreed on the major points and had made a commitment to Congress, could not draft a single paragraph. Hours passed in a hell of fruitless negotiation, self-defeating proposals and impulsive speechifying. Pomerance and Scoville pushed to include a statement calling for the United States to “sharply accelerate international dialogue,” but they were sunk by objections and caveats.
  • They never got to policy proposals. They never got to the second paragraph. The final statement was signed by only the moderator, who phrased it more weakly than the declaration calling for the workshop in the first place. “The guide I would suggest,” Jorling wrote, “is whether we know enough not to recommend changes in existing policy.”
  • Pomerance had seen enough. A consensus-based strategy would not work — could not work — without American leadership. And the United States wouldn’t act unless a strong leader persuaded it to do so — someone who would speak with authority about the science, demand action from those in power and risk everything in pursuit of justice.
  • The meeting ended Friday morning. On Tuesday, four days later, Ronald Reagan was elected president.
  • ‘Otherwise, They’ll Gurgle’ November 1980-September 1981
  • In the midst of this carnage, the Council on Environmental Quality submitted a report to the White House warning that fossil fuels could “permanently and disastrously” alter Earth’s atmosphere, leading to “a warming of the Earth, possibly with very serious effects.” Reagan did not act on the council’s advice. Instead, his administration considered eliminating the council.
  • After the election, Reagan considered plans to close the Energy Department, increase coal production on federal land and deregulate surface coal mining. Once in office, he appointed James Watt, the president of a legal firm that fought to open public lands to mining and drilling, to run the Interior Department. “We’re deliriously happy,” the president of the National Coal Association was reported to have said. Reagan preserved the E.P.A. but named as its administrator Anne Gorsuch, an anti-regulation zealot who proceeded to cut the agency’s staff and budget by about a quarter
  • Reagan “has declared open war on solar energy,” the director of the nation’s lead solar-energy research agency said, after he was asked to resign). Reagan appeared determined to reverse the environmental achievements of Jimmy Carter, before undoing those of Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedy and, if he could get away with it, Theodore Roosevelt.
  • When Reagan considered closing the Council on Environmental Quality, its acting chairman, Malcolm Forbes Baldwin, wrote to the vice president and the White House chief of staff begging them to reconsider; in a major speech the same week, “A Conservative’s Program for the Environment,” Baldwin argued that it was “time for today’s conservatives explicitly to embrace environmentalism.” Environmental protection was not only good sense. It was good business. What could be more conservative than an efficient use of resources that led to fewer federal subsidies?
  • Meanwhile the Charney report continued to vibrate at the periphery of public consciousness. Its conclusions were confirmed by major studies from the Aspen Institute, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis near Vienna and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Every month or so, nationally syndicated articles appeared summoning apocalypse: “Another Warning on ‘Greenhouse Effect,’ ” “Global Warming Trend ‘Beyond Human Experience,’ ” “Warming Trend Could ‘Pit Nation Against Nation.’
  • Pomerance read on the front page of The New York Times on Aug. 22, 1981, about a forthcoming paper in Science by a team of seven NASA scientists. They had found that the world had already warmed in the past century. Temperatures hadn’t increased beyond the range of historical averages, but the scientists predicted that the warming signal would emerge from the noise of routine weather fluctuations much sooner than previously expected. Most unusual of all, the paper ended with a policy recommendation: In the coming decades, the authors wrote, humankind should develop alternative sources of energy and use fossil fuels only “as necessary.” The lead author was James Hansen.
  • Pomerance listened and watched. He understood Hansen’s basic findings well enough: Earth had been warming since 1880, and the warming would reach “almost unprecedented magnitude” in the next century, leading to the familiar suite of terrors, including the flooding of a 10th of New Jersey and a quarter of Louisiana and Florida. But Pomerance was excited to find that Hansen could translate the complexities of atmospheric science into plain English.
  • 7. ‘We’re All Going to Be the Victims’ March 1982
  • Gore had learned about climate change a dozen years earlier as an undergraduate at Harvard, when he took a class taught by Roger Revelle. Humankind was on the brink of radically transforming the global atmosphere, Revelle explained, drawing Keeling’s rising zigzag on the blackboard, and risked bringing about the collapse of civilization. Gore was stunned: Why wasn’t anyone talking about this?
  • Most in Congress considered the science committee a legislative backwater, if they considered it at all; this made Gore’s subcommittee, which had no legislative authority, an afterthought to an afterthought. That, Gore vowed, would change. Environmental and health stories had all the elements of narrative drama: villains, victims and heroes. In a hearing, you could summon all three, with the chairman serving as narrator, chorus and moral authority. He told his staff director that he wanted to hold a hearing every week.
  • The Revelle hearing went as Grumbly had predicted. The urgency of the issue was lost on Gore’s older colleagues, who drifted in and out while the witnesses testified. There were few people left by the time the Brookings Institution economist Lester Lave warned that humankind’s profligate exploitation of fossil fuels posed an existential test to human nature. “Carbon dioxide stands as a symbol now of our willingness to confront the future,” he said. “It will be a sad day when we decide that we just don’t have the time or thoughtfulness to address those issues.”
  • That night, the news programs featured the resolution of the baseball strike, the ongoing budgetary debate and the national surplus of butter.
  • There emerged, despite the general comity, a partisan divide. Unlike the Democrats, the Republicans demanded action. “Today I have a sense of déjà vu,” said Robert Walker, a Republican from Pennsylvania. In each of the last five years, he said, “we have been told and told and told that there is a problem with the increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We all accept that fact, and we realize that the potential consequences are certainly major in their impact on mankind.” Yet they had failed to propose a single law. “Now is the time,” he said. “The research is clear. It is up to us now to summon the political will.”
  • Hansen flew to Washington to testify on March 25, 1982, performing before a gallery even more thinly populated than at Gore’s first hearing on the greenhouse effect. Gore began by attacking the Reagan administration for cutting funding for carbon-dioxide research despite the “broad consensus in the scientific community that the greenhouse effect is a reality.” William Carney, a Republican from New York, bemoaned the burning of fossil fuels and argued passionately that science should serve as the basis for legislative policy
  • the experts invited by Gore agreed with the Republicans: The science was certain enough. Melvin Calvin, a Berkeley chemist who won the Nobel Prize for his work on the carbon cycle, said that it was useless to wait for stronger evidence of warming. “You cannot do a thing about it when the signals are so big that they come out of the noise,” he said. “You have to look for early warning signs.”
  • Hansen’s job was to share the warning signs, to translate the data into plain English. He explained a few discoveries that his team had made — not with computer models but in libraries. By analyzing records from hundreds of weather stations, he found that the surface temperature of the planet had already increased four-tenths of a degree Celsius in the previous century. Data from several hundred tide-gauge stations showed that the oceans had risen four inches since the 1880s
  • It occurred to Hansen that this was the only political question that mattered: How long until the worst began? It was not a question on which geophysicists expended much effort; the difference between five years and 50 years in the future was meaningless in geologic time. Politicians were capable of thinking only in terms of electoral time: six years, four years, two years. But when it came to the carbon problem, the two time schemes were converging.
  • “Within 10 or 20 years,” Hansen said, “we will see climate changes which are clearly larger than the natural variability.” James Scheuer wanted to make sure he understood this correctly. No one else had predicted that the signal would emerge that quickly. “If it were one or two degrees per century,” he said, “that would be within the range of human adaptability. But we are pushing beyond the range of human adaptability.” “Yes,” Hansen said.
  • How soon, Scheuer asked, would they have to change the national model of energy production? Hansen hesitated — it wasn’t a scientific question. But he couldn’t help himself. He had been irritated, during the hearing, by all the ludicrous talk about the possibility of growing more trees to offset emissions. False hopes were worse than no hope at all: They undermined the prospect of developing real solutions. “That time is very soon,” Hansen said finally. “My opinion is that it is past,” Calvin said, but he was not heard because he spoke from his seat. He was told to speak into the microphone. “It is already later,” Calvin said, “than you think.”
  • From Gore’s perspective, the hearing was an unequivocal success. That night Dan Rather devoted three minutes of “CBS Evening News” to the greenhouse effect. A correspondent explained that temperatures had increased over the previous century, great sheets of pack ice in Antarctica were rapidly melting, the seas were rising; Calvin said that “the trend is all in the direction of an impending catastrophe”; and Gore mocked Reagan for his shortsightedness. Later, Gore could take credit for protecting the Energy Department’s carbon-dioxide program, which in the end was largely preserved.
  • 8. ‘The Direction of an Impending Catastrophe’ 1982
  • Following Henry Shaw’s recommendation to establish credibility ahead of any future legislative battles, Exxon had begun to spend conspicuously on global-warming research. It donated tens of thousands of dollars to some of the most prominent research efforts, including one at Woods Hole led by the ecologist George Woodwell, who had been calling for major climate policy as early as the mid-1970s, and an international effort coordinated by the United Nations. Now Shaw offered to fund the October 1982 symposium on climate change at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty campus.
  • David boasted that Exxon would usher in a new global energy system to save the planet from the ravages of climate change. He went so far as to argue that capitalism’s blind faith in the wisdom of the free market was “less than satisfying” when it came to the greenhouse effect. Ethical considerations were necessary, too. He pledged that Exxon would revise its corporate strategy to account for climate change, even if it were not “fashionable” to do so. As Exxon had already made heavy investments in nuclear and solar technology, he was “generally upbeat” that Exxon would “invent” a future of renewable energy.
  • Hansen had reason to feel upbeat himself. If the world’s largest oil-and-gas company supported a new national energy model, the White House would not stand in its way. The Reagan administration was hostile to change from within its ranks. But it couldn’t be hostile to Exxon.
  • The carbon-dioxide issue was beginning to receive major national attention — Hansen’s own findings had become front-page news, after all. What started as a scientific story was turning into a political story.
  • The political realm was itself a kind of Mirror World, a parallel reality that crudely mimicked our own. It shared many of our most fundamental laws, like the laws of gravity and inertia and publicity. And if you applied enough pressure, the Mirror World of politics could be sped forward to reveal a new future. Hansen was beginning to understand that too.
  • 1. ‘Caution, Not Panic’ 1983-1984
  • in the fall of 1983, the climate issue entered an especially long, dark winter. And all because of a single report that had done nothing to change the state of climate science but transformed the state of climate politics.
  • After the publication of the Charney report in 1979, Jimmy Carter had directed the National Academy of Sciences to prepare a comprehensive, $1 million analysis of the carbon-dioxide problem: a Warren Commission for the greenhouse effect. A team of scientist-dignitaries — among them Revelle, the Princeton modeler Syukuro Manabe and the Harvard political economist Thomas Schelling, one of the intellectual architects of Cold War game theory — would review the literature, evaluate the consequences of global warming for the world order and propose remedies
  • Then Reagan won the White House.
  • the incipient report served as the Reagan administration’s answer to every question on the subject. There could be no climate policy, Fred Koomanoff and his associates said, until the academy ruled. In the Mirror World of the Reagan administration, the warming problem hadn’t been abandoned at all. A careful, comprehensive solution was being devised. Everyone just had to wait for the academy’s elders to explain what it was.
  • The committee’s chairman, William Nierenberg — a Jason, presidential adviser and director of Scripps, the nation’s pre-eminent oceanographic institution — argued that action had to be taken immediately, before all the details could be known with certainty, or else it would be too late.
  • Better to bet on American ingenuity to save the day. Major interventions in national energy policy, taken immediately, might end up being more expensive, and less effective, than actions taken decades in the future, after more was understood about the economic and social consequences of a warmer planet. Yes, the climate would change, mostly for the worst, but future generations would be better equipped to change with it.
  • Government officials who knew Nierenberg were not surprised by his conclusions: He was an optimist by training and experience, a devout believer in the doctrine of American exceptionalism, one of the elite class of scientists who had helped the nation win a global war, invent the most deadly weapon conceivable and create the booming aerospace and computer industries. America had solved every existential problem it had confronted over the previous generation; it would not be daunted by an excess of carbon dioxide. Nierenberg had also served on Reagan’s transition team. Nobody believed that he had been directly influenced by his political connections, but his views — optimistic about the saving graces of market forces, pessimistic about the value of government regulation — reflected all the ardor of his party.
  • That’s what Nierenberg wrote in “Changing Climate.” But it’s not what he said in the press interviews that followed. He argued the opposite: There was no urgent need for action. The public should not entertain the most “extreme negative speculations” about climate change (despite the fact that many of those speculations appeared in his report). Though “Changing Climate” urged an accelerated transition to renewable fuels, noting that it would take thousands of years for the atmosphere to recover from the damage of the last century, Nierenberg recommended “caution, not panic.” Better to wait and see
  • The damage of “Changing Climate” was squared by the amount of attention it received. Nierenberg’s speech in the Great Hall, being one-500th the length of the actual assessment, received 500 times the press coverage. As The Wall Street Journal put it, in a line echoed by trade journals across the nation: “A panel of top scientists has some advice for people worried about the much-publicized warming of the Earth’s climate: You can cope.”
  • On “CBS Evening News,” Dan Rather said the academy had given “a cold shoulder” to a grim, 200-page E.P.A. assessment published earlier that week (titled “Can We Delay a Greenhouse Warming?”; the E.P.A.’s answer, reduced to a word, was no). The Washington Post described the two reports, taken together, as “clarion calls to inaction.
  • George Keyworth II, Reagan’s science adviser. Keyworth used Nierenberg’s optimism as reason to discount the E.P.A.’s “unwarranted and unnecessarily alarmist” report and warned against taking any “near-term corrective action” on global warming. Just in case it wasn’t clear, Keyworth added, “there are no actions recommended other than continued research.”
  • Edward David Jr., two years removed from boasting of Exxon’s commitment to transforming global energy policy, told Science that the corporation had reconsidered. “Exxon has reverted to being mainly a supplier of conventional hydrocarbon fuels — petroleum products, natural gas and steam coal,” David said. The American Petroleum Institute canceled its own carbon-dioxide research program, too.
  • Exxon soon revised its position on climate-change research. In a presentation at an industry conference, Henry Shaw cited “Changing Climate” as evidence that “the general consensus is that society has sufficient time to technologically adapt to a CO₂ greenhouse effect.” If the academy had concluded that regulations were not a serious option, why should Exxon protest
  • 2. ‘You Scientists Win’ 1985
  • 3. The Size of The Human Imagination Spring-Summer 1986
  • Curtis Moore’s proposal: Use ozone to revive climate. The ozone hole had a solution — an international treaty, already in negotiation. Why not hitch the milk wagon to the bullet train? Pomerance was skeptical. The problems were related, sure: Without a reduction in CFC emissions, you didn’t have a chance of averting cataclysmic global warming. But it had been difficult enough to explain the carbon issue to politicians and journalists; why complicate the sales pitch? Then again, he didn’t see what choice he had. The Republicans controlled the Senate, and Moore was his connection to the Senate’s environmental committee.
  • Pomerance met with Senator John Chafee, a Republican from Rhode Island, and helped persuade him to hold a double-barreled hearing on the twin problems of ozone and carbon dioxide on June 10 and 11, 1986
  • F.Sherwood Rowland, Robert Watson, a NASA scientist, and Richard Benedick, the administration’s lead representative in international ozone negotiations, would discuss ozone; James Hansen, Al Gore, the ecologist George Woodwell and Carl Wunsch, a veteran of the Charney group, would testify about climate change.
  • As Pomerance had hoped, fear about the ozone layer ensured a bounty of press coverage for the climate-change testimony. But as he had feared, it caused many people to conflate the two crises. One was Peter Jennings, who aired the video on ABC’s “World News Tonight,” warning that the ozone hole “could lead to flooding all over the world, also to drought and to famine.”
  • The confusion helped: For the first time since the “Changing Climate” report, global-warming headlines appeared by the dozen. William Nierenberg’s “caution, not panic” line was inverted. It was all panic without a hint of caution: “A Dire Forecast for ‘Greenhouse’ Earth” (the front page of The Washington Post); “Scientists Predict Catastrophes in Growing Global Heat Wave” (Chicago Tribune); “Swifter Warming of Globe Foreseen” (The New York Times).
  • After three years of backsliding and silence, Pomerance was exhilarated to see interest in the issue spike overnight. Not only that: A solution materialized, and a moral argument was passionately articulated — by Rhode Island’s Republican senator no less. “Ozone depletion and the greenhouse effect can no longer be treated solely as important scientific questions,” Chafee said. “They must be seen as critical problems facing the nations of the world, and they are problems that demand solutions.”
  • The old canard about the need for more research was roundly mocked — by Woodwell, by a W.R.I. colleague named Andrew Maguire, by Senator George Mitchell, a Democrat from Maine. “Scientists are never 100 percent certain,” the Princeton historian Theodore Rabb testified. “That notion of total certainty is something too elusive ever to be sought.” As Pomerance had been saying since 1979, it was past time to act. Only now the argument was so broadly accepted that nobody dared object.
  • The ozone hole, Pomerance realized, had moved the public because, though it was no more visible than global warming, people could be made to see it. They could watch it grow on video. Its metaphors were emotionally wrought: Instead of summoning a glass building that sheltered plants from chilly weather (“Everything seems to flourish in there”), the hole evoked a violent rending of the firmament, inviting deathly radiation. Americans felt that their lives were in danger. An abstract, atmospheric problem had been reduced to the size of the human imagination. It had been made just small enough, and just large enough, to break through.
  • Four years after “Changing Climate,” two years after a hole had torn open the firmament and a month after the United States and more than three dozen other nations signed a treaty to limit use of CFCs, the climate-change corps was ready to celebrate. It had become conventional wisdom that climate change would follow ozone’s trajectory. Reagan’s E.P.A. administrator, Lee M. Thomas, said as much the day he signed the Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer (the successor to the Vienna Convention), telling reporters that global warming was likely to be the subject of a future international agreement
  • Congress had already begun to consider policy — in 1987 alone, there were eight days of climate hearings, in three committees, across both chambers of Congress; Senator Joe Biden, a Delaware Democrat, had introduced legislation to establish a national climate-change strategy. And so it was that Jim Hansen found himself on Oct. 27 in the not especially distinguished ballroom of the Quality Inn on New Jersey Avenue, a block from the Capitol, at “Preparing for Climate Change,” which was technically a conference but felt more like a wedding.
  • John Topping was an old-line Rockefeller Republican, a Commerce Department lawyer under Nixon and an E.P.A. official under Reagan. He first heard about the climate problem in the halls of the E.P.A. in 1982 and sought out Hansen, who gave him a personal tutorial. Topping was amazed to discover that out of the E.P.A.’s 13,000-person staff, only seven people, by his count, were assigned to work on climate, though he figured it was more important to the long-term security of the nation than every other environmental issue combined.
  • Glancing around the room, Jim Hansen could chart, like an arborist counting rings on a stump, the growth of the climate issue over the decade. Veterans like Gordon MacDonald, George Woodwell and the environmental biologist Stephen Schneider stood at the center of things. Former and current staff members from the congressional science committees (Tom Grumbly, Curtis Moore, Anthony Scoville) made introductions to the congressmen they advised. Hansen’s owlish nemesis Fred Koomanoff was present, as were his counterparts from the Soviet Union and Western Europe. Rafe Pomerance’s cranium could be seen above the crowd, but unusually he was surrounded by colleagues from other environmental organizations that until now had shown little interest in a diffuse problem with no proven fund-raising record. The party’s most conspicuous newcomers, however, the outermost ring, were the oil-and-gas executives.
  • That evening, as a storm spat and coughed outside, Rafe Pomerance gave one of his exhortative speeches urging cooperation among the various factions, and John Chafee and Roger Revelle received awards; introductions were made and business cards earnestly exchanged. Not even a presentation by Hansen of his research could sour the mood. The next night, on Oct. 28, at a high-spirited dinner party in Topping’s townhouse on Capitol Hill, the oil-and-gas men joked with the environmentalists, the trade-group representatives chatted up the regulators and the academics got merrily drunk. Mikhail Budyko, the don of the Soviet climatologists, settled into an extended conversation about global warming with Topping’s 10-year-old son. It all seemed like the start of a grand bargain, a uniting of factions — a solution.
  • Hansen was accustomed to the bureaucratic nuisances that attended testifying before Congress; before a hearing, he had to send his formal statement to NASA headquarters, which forwarded it to the White House’s Office of Management and Budget for approval. “Major greenhouse climate changes are a certainty,” he had written. “By the 2010s [in every scenario], essentially the entire globe has very substantial warming.”
  • By all appearances, plans for major policy continued to advance rapidly. After the Johnston hearing, Timothy Wirth, a freshman Democratic senator from Colorado on the energy committee, began to plan a comprehensive package of climate-change legislation — a New Deal for global warming. Wirth asked a legislative assistant, David Harwood, to consult with experts on the issue, beginning with Rafe Pomerance, in the hope of converting the science of climate change into a new national energy policy.
  • In March 1988, Wirth joined 41 other senators, nearly half of them Republicans, to demand that Reagan call for an international treaty modeled after the ozone agreement. Because the United States and the Soviet Union were the world’s two largest contributors of carbon emissions, responsible for about one-third of the world total, they should lead the negotiations. Reagan agreed. In May, he signed a joint statement with Mikhail Gorbachev that included a pledge to cooperate on global warming.
  • Al Gore himself had, for the moment, withdrawn his political claim to the issue. In 1987, at the age of 39, Gore announced that he was running for president, in part to bring attention to global warming, but he stopped emphasizing it after the subject failed to captivate New Hampshire primary voters.
  • 5. ‘You Will See Things That You Shall Believe’ Summer 1988
  • It was the hottest and driest summer in history. Everywhere you looked, something was bursting into flames. Two million acres in Alaska incinerated, and dozens of major fires scored the West. Yellowstone National Park lost nearly one million acres. Smoke was visible from Chicago, 1,600 miles away.
  • In Nebraska, suffering its worst drought since the Dust Bowl, there were days when every weather station registered temperatures above 100 degrees. The director of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment warned that the drought might be the dawning of a climatic change that within a half century could turn the state into a desert.
  • On June 22 in Washington, where it hit 100 degrees, Rafe Pomerance received a call from Jim Hansen, who was scheduled to testify the following morning at a Senate hearing called by Timothy Wirth. “I hope we have good media coverage tomorrow,” Hansen said.
  • Hansen had just received the most recent global temperature data. Just over halfway into the year, 1988 was setting records. Already it had nearly clinched the hottest year in history. Ahead of schedule, the signal was emerging from the noise. “I’m going to make a pretty strong statement,” Hansen said.
  • Hansen returned to his testimony. He wrote: “The global warming is now large enough that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause-and-effect relationship to the greenhouse effect.” He wrote: “1988 so far is so much warmer than 1987, that barring a remarkable and improbable cooling, 1988 will be the warmest year on record.” He wrote: “The greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now.”
  • “We have only one planet,” Senator Bennett Johnston intoned. “If we screw it up, we have no place to go.” Senator Max Baucus, a Democrat from Montana, called for the United Nations Environment Program to begin preparing a global remedy to the carbon-dioxide problem. Senator Dale Bumpers, a Democrat of Arkansas, previewed Hansen’s testimony, saying that it “ought to be cause for headlines in every newspaper in America tomorrow morning.” The coverage, Bumpers emphasized, was a necessary precursor to policy. “Nobody wants to take on any of the industries that produce the things that we throw up into the atmosphere,” he said. “But what you have are all these competing interests pitted against our very survival.”
  • Hansen, wiping his brow, spoke without affect, his eyes rarely rising from his notes. The warming trend could be detected “with 99 percent confidence,” he said. “It is changing our climate now.” But he saved his strongest comment for after the hearing, when he was encircled in the hallway by reporters. “It is time to stop waffling so much,” he said, “and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.”
  • The press followed Bumpers’s advice. Hansen’s testimony prompted headlines in dozens of newspapers across the country, including The New York Times, which announced, across the top of its front page: “Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate.”
  • Rafe Pomerance called his allies on Capitol Hill, the young staff members who advised politicians, organized hearings, wrote legislation. We need to finalize a number, he told them, a specific target, in order to move the issue — to turn all this publicity into policy. The Montreal Protocol had called for a 50 percent reduction in CFC emissions by 1998. What was the right target for carbon emissions? It wasn’t enough to exhort nations to do better. That kind of talk might sound noble, but it didn’t change investments or laws. They needed a hard goal — something ambitious but reasonable. And they needed it soon: Just four days after Hansen’s star turn, politicians from 46 nations and more than 300 scientists would convene in Toronto at the World Conference on the Changing Atmosphere, an event described by Philip Shabecoff of The New York Times as “Woodstock for climate change.”
  • Pomerance had a proposal: a 20 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2000. Ambitious, Harwood said. In all his work planning climate policy, he had seen no assurance that such a steep drop in emissions was possible. Then again, 2000 was more than a decade off, so it allowed for some flexibility.
  • Mintzer pointed out that a 20 percent reduction was consistent with the academic literature on energy efficiency. Various studies over the years had shown that you could improve efficiency in most energy systems by roughly 20 percent if you adopted best practices.
  • Of course, with any target, you had to take into account the fact that the developing world would inevitably consume much larger quantities of fossil fuels by 2000. But those gains could be offset by a wider propagation of the renewable technologies already at hand — solar, wind, geothermal. It was not a rigorous scientific analysis, Mintzer granted, but 20 percent sounded plausible. We wouldn’t need to solve cold fusion or ask Congress to repeal the law of gravity. We could manage it with the knowledge and technology we already had.
  • Besides, Pomerance said, 20 by 2000 sounds good.
  • The conference’s final statement, signed by all 400 scientists and politicians in attendance, repeated the demand with a slight variation: a 20 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2005. Just like that, Pomerance’s best guess became global diplomatic policy.
  • Hansen, emerging from Anniek’s successful cancer surgery, took it upon himself to start a one-man public information campaign. He gave news conferences and was quoted in seemingly every article about the issue; he even appeared on television with homemade props. Like an entrant at an elementary-school science fair, he made “loaded dice” out of sections of cardboard and colored paper to illustrate the increased likelihood of hotter weather in a warmer climate. Public awareness of the greenhouse effect reached a new high of 68 percent
  • global warming became a major subject of the presidential campaign. While Michael Dukakis proposed tax incentives to encourage domestic oil production and boasted that coal could satisfy the nation’s energy needs for the next three centuries, George Bush took advantage. “I am an environmentalist,” he declared on the shore of Lake Erie, the first stop on a five-state environmental tour that would take him to Boston Harbor, Dukakis’s home turf. “Those who think we are powerless to do anything about the greenhouse effect,” he said, “are forgetting about the White House effect.”
  • His running mate emphasized the ticket’s commitment to the issue at the vice-presidential debate. “The greenhouse effect is an important environmental issue,” Dan Quayle said. “We need to get on with it. And in a George Bush administration, you can bet that we will.”
  • This kind of talk roused the oil-and-gas men. “A lot of people on the Hill see the greenhouse effect as the issue of the 1990s,” a gas lobbyist told Oil & Gas Journal. Before a meeting of oil executives shortly after the “environmentalist” candidate won the election, Representative Dick Cheney, a Wyoming Republican, warned, “It’s going to be very difficult to fend off some kind of gasoline tax.” The coal industry, which had the most to lose from restrictions on carbon emissions, had moved beyond denial to resignation. A spokesman for the National Coal Association acknowledged that the greenhouse effect was no longer “an emerging issue. It is here already, and we’ll be hearing more and more about it.”
  • By the end of the year, 32 climate bills had been introduced in Congress, led by Wirth’s omnibus National Energy Policy Act of 1988. Co-sponsored by 13 Democrats and five Republicans, it established as a national goal an “International Global Agreement on the Atmosphere by 1992,” ordered the Energy Department to submit to Congress a plan to reduce energy use by at least 2 percent a year through 2005 and directed the Congressional Budget Office to calculate the feasibility of a carbon tax. A lawyer for the Senate energy committee told an industry journal that lawmakers were “frightened” by the issue and predicted that Congress would eventually pass significant legislation after Bush took office
  • The other great powers refused to wait. The German Parliament created a special commission on climate change, which concluded that action had to be taken immediately, “irrespective of any need for further research,” and that the Toronto goal was inadequate; it recommended a 30 percent reduction of carbon emissions
  • Margaret Thatcher, who had studied chemistry at Oxford, warned in a speech to the Royal Society that global warming could “greatly exceed the capacity of our natural habitat to cope” and that “the health of the economy and the health of our environment are totally dependent upon each other.”
  • The prime ministers of Canada and Norway called for a binding international treaty on the atmosphere; Sweden’s Parliament went further, announcing a national strategy to stabilize emissions at the 1988 level and eventually imposing a carbon tax
  • the United Nations unanimously endorsed the establishment, by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Program, of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, composed of scientists and policymakers, to conduct scientific assessments and develop global climate policy.
  • One of the I.P.C.C.’s first sessions to plan an international treaty was hosted by the State Department, 10 days after Bush’s inauguration. James Baker chose the occasion to make his first speech as secretary of state. “We can probably not afford to wait until all of the uncertainties about global climate change have been resolved,” he said. “Time will not make the problem go away.”
  • : On April 14, 1989, a bipartisan group of 24 senators, led by the majority leader, George Mitchell, requested that Bush cut emissions in the United States even before the I.P.C.C.’s working group made its recommendation. “We cannot afford the long lead times associated with a comprehensive global agreement,” the senators wrote. Bush had promised to combat the greenhouse effect with the White House effect. The self-proclaimed environmentalist was now seated in the Oval Office. It was time.
  • 8. ‘You Never Beat The White House’ April 1989
  • After Jim Baker gave his boisterous address to the I.P.C.C. working group at the State Department, he received a visit from John Sununu, Bush’s chief of staff. Leave the science to the scientists, Sununu told Baker. Stay clear of this greenhouse-effect nonsense. You don’t know what you’re talking about. Baker, who had served as Reagan’s chief of staff, didn’t speak about the subject again.
  • despite his reputation as a political wolf, he still thought of himself as a scientist — an “old engineer,” as he was fond of putting it, having earned a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from M.I.T. decades earlier. He lacked the reflexive deference that so many of his political generation reserved for the class of elite government scientists.
  • Since World War II, he believed, conspiratorial forces had used the imprimatur of scientific knowledge to advance an “anti-growth” doctrine. He reserved particular disdain for Paul Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb,” which prophesied that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death if the world took no step to curb population growth; the Club of Rome, an organization of European scientists, heads of state and economists, which similarly warned that the world would run out of natural resources; and as recently as the mid-’70s, the hypothesis advanced by some of the nation’s most celebrated scientists — including Carl Sagan, Stephen Schneider and Ichtiaque Rasool — that a new ice age was dawning, thanks to the proliferation of man-made aerosols. All were theories of questionable scientific merit, portending vast, authoritarian remedies to halt economic progress.
  • When Mead talked about “far-reaching” decisions and “long-term consequences,” Sununu heard the marching of jackboots.
  • Sununu had suspected that the greenhouse effect belonged to this nefarious cabal since 1975, when the anthropologist Margaret Mead convened a symposium on the subject at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.
  • While Sununu and Darman reviewed Hansen’s statements, the E.P.A. administrator, William K. Reilly, took a new proposal to the White House. The next meeting of the I.P.C.C.’s working group was scheduled for Geneva the following month, in May; it was the perfect occasion, Reilly argued, to take a stronger stand on climate change. Bush should demand a global treaty to reduce carbon emissions.
  • Sununu wouldn’t budge. He ordered the American delegates not to make any commitment in Geneva. Very soon after that, someone leaked the exchange to the press.
  • A deputy of Jim Baker pulled Reilly aside. He said he had a message from Baker, who had observed Reilly’s infighting with Sununu. “In the long run,” the deputy warned Reilly, “you never beat the White House.”
  • 9. ‘A Form of Science Fraud’ May 1989
  • The cameras followed Hansen and Gore into the marbled hallway. Hansen insisted that he wanted to focus on the science. Gore focused on the politics. “I think they’re scared of the truth,” he said. “They’re scared that Hansen and the other scientists are right and that some dramatic policy changes are going to be needed, and they don’t want to face up to it.”
  • The censorship did more to publicize Hansen’s testimony and the dangers of global warming than anything he could have possibly said. At the White House briefing later that morning, Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater admitted that Hansen’s statement had been changed. He blamed an official “five levels down from the top” and promised that there would be no retaliation. Hansen, he added, was “an outstanding and distinguished scientist” and was “doing a great job.”
  • 10. The White House Effect Fall 1989
  • The Los Angeles Times called the censorship “an outrageous assault.” The Chicago Tribune said it was the beginning of “a cold war on global warming,” and The New York Times warned that the White House’s “heavy-handed intervention sends the signal that Washington wants to go slow on addressing the greenhouse problem.”
  • Darman went to see Sununu. He didn’t like being accused of censoring scientists. They needed to issue some kind of response. Sununu called Reilly to ask if he had any ideas. We could start, Reilly said, by recommitting to a global climate treaty. The United States was the only Western nation on record as opposing negotiations.
  • Sununu sent a telegram to Geneva endorsing a plan “to develop full international consensus on necessary steps to prepare for a formal treaty-negotiating process. The scope and importance of this issue are so great that it is essential for the U.S. to exercise leadership.”
  • Sununu seethed at any mention of the subject. He had taken it upon himself to study more deeply the greenhouse effect; he would have a rudimentary, one-dimensional general circulation model installed on his personal desktop computer. He decided that the models promoted by Jim Hansen were a lot of bunk. They were horribly imprecise in scale and underestimated the ocean’s ability to mitigate warming. Sununu complained about Hansen to D. Allan Bromley, a nuclear physicist from Yale who, at Sununu’s recommendation, was named Bush’s science adviser. Hansen’s findings were “technical poppycock” that didn’t begin to justify such wild-eyed pronouncements that “the greenhouse effect is here” or that the 1988 heat waves could be attributed to global warming, let alone serve as the basis for national economic policy.
  • When a junior staff member in the Energy Department, in a meeting at the White House with Sununu and Reilly, mentioned an initiative to reduce fossil-fuel use, Sununu interrupted her. “Why in the world would you need to reduce fossil-fuel use?” he asked. “Because of climate change,” the young woman replied. “I don’t want anyone in this administration without a scientific background using ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming’ ever again,” he said. “If you don’t have a technical basis for policy, don’t run around making decisions on the basis of newspaper headlines.” After the meeting, Reilly caught up to the staff member in the hallway. She was shaken. Don’t take it personally, Reilly told her. Sununu might have been looking at you, but that was directed at me.
  • Reilly, for his part, didn’t entirely blame Sununu for Bush’s indecision on the prospect of a climate treaty. The president had never taken a vigorous interest in global warming and was mainly briefed about it by nonscientists. Bush had brought up the subject on the campaign trail, in his speech about the White House effect, after leafing through a briefing booklet for a new issue that might generate some positive press. When Reilly tried in person to persuade him to take action, Bush deferred to Sununu and Baker. Why don’t the three of you work it out, he said. Let me know when you decide
  • Relations between Sununu and Reilly became openly adversarial. Reilly, Sununu thought, was a creature of the environmental lobby. He was trying to impress his friends at the E.P.A. without having a basic grasp of the science himself.
  • Pomerance had the sinking feeling that the momentum of the previous year was beginning to flag. The censoring of Hansen’s testimony and the inexplicably strident opposition from John Sununu were ominous signs. So were the findings of a report Pomerance had commissioned, published in September by the World Resources Institute, tracking global greenhouse-gas emissions. The United States was the largest contributor by far, producing nearly a quarter of the world’s carbon emissions, and its contribution was growing faster than that of every other country. Bush’s indecision, or perhaps inattention, had already managed to delay the negotiation of a global climate treaty until 1990 at the earliest, perhaps even 1991. By then, Pomerance worried, it would be too late.
  • Pomerance tried to be more diplomatic. “The president made a commitment to the American people to deal with global warming,” he told The Washington Post, “and he hasn’t followed it up.” He didn’t want to sound defeated. “There are some good building blocks here,” Pomerance said, and he meant it. The Montreal Protocol on CFCs wasn’t perfect at first, either — it had huge loopholes and weak restrictions. Once in place, however, the restrictions could be tightened. Perhaps the same could happen with climate change. Perhaps. Pomerance was not one for pessimism. As William Reilly told reporters, dutifully defending the official position forced upon him, it was the first time that the United States had formally endorsed the concept of an emissions limit. Pomerance wanted to believe that this was progress.
  • All week in Noordwijk, Becker couldn’t stop talking about what he had seen in Zeeland. After a flood in 1953, when the sea swallowed much of the region, killing more than 2,000 people, the Dutch began to build the Delta Works, a vast concrete-and-steel fortress of movable barriers, dams and sluice gates — a masterpiece of human engineering. The whole system could be locked into place within 90 minutes, defending the land against storm surge. It reduced the country’s exposure to the sea by 700 kilometers, Becker explained. The United States coastline was about 153,000 kilometers long. How long, he asked, was the entire terrestrial coastline? Because the whole world was going to need this. In Zeeland, he said, he had seen the future.
  • Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, Calif., has a habit of asking new graduate students to name the largest fundamental breakthrough in climate physics since 1979. It’s a trick question. There has been no breakthrough. As with any mature scientific discipline, there is only refinement. The computer models grow more precise; the regional analyses sharpen; estimates solidify into observational data. Where there have been inaccuracies, they have tended to be in the direction of understatement.
  • More carbon has been released into the atmosphere since the final day of the Noordwijk conference, Nov. 7, 1989, than in the entire history of civilization preceding it
  • Despite every action taken since the Charney report — the billions of dollars invested in research, the nonbinding treaties, the investments in renewable energy — the only number that counts, the total quantity of global greenhouse gas emitted per year, has continued its inexorable rise.
  • When it comes to our own nation, which has failed to make any binding commitments whatsoever, the dominant narrative for the last quarter century has concerned the efforts of the fossil-fuel industries to suppress science, confuse public knowledge and bribe politicians.
  • The mustache-twirling depravity of these campaigns has left the impression that the oil-and-gas industry always operated thus; while the Exxon scientists and American Petroleum Institute clerics of the ’70s and ’80s were hardly good Samaritans, they did not start multimillion-dollar disinformation campaigns, pay scientists to distort the truth or try to brainwash children in elementary schools, as their successors would.
  • It was James Hansen’s testimony before Congress in 1988 that, for the first time since the “Changing Climate” report, made oil-and-gas executives begin to consider the issue’s potential to hurt their profits. Exxon, as ever, led the field. Six weeks after Hansen’s testimony, Exxon’s manager of science and strategy development, Duane LeVine, prepared an internal strategy paper urging the company to “emphasize the uncertainty in scientific conclusions.” This shortly became the default position of the entire sector. LeVine, it so happened, served as chairman of the global petroleum industry’s Working Group on Global Climate Change, created the same year, which adopted Exxon’s position as its own
  • The American Petroleum Institute, after holding a series of internal briefings on the subject in the fall and winter of 1988, including one for the chief executives of the dozen or so largest oil companies, took a similar, if slightly more diplomatic, line. It set aside money for carbon-dioxide policy — about $100,000, a fraction of the millions it was spending on the health effects of benzene, but enough to establish a lobbying organization called, in an admirable flourish of newspeak, the Global Climate Coalition.
  • The G.C.C. was conceived as a reactive body, to share news of any proposed regulations, but on a whim, it added a press campaign, to be coordinated mainly by the A.P.I. It gave briefings to politicians known to be friendly to the industry and approached scientists who professed skepticism about global warming. The A.P.I.’s payment for an original op-ed was $2,000.
  • It was joined by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and 14 other trade associations, including those representing the coal, electric-grid and automobile industries
  • In October 1989, scientists allied with the G.C.C. began to be quoted in national publications, giving an issue that lacked controversy a convenient fulcrum. “Many respected scientists say the available evidence doesn’t warrant the doomsday warnings,” was the caveat that began to appear in articles on climate change.
  • The following year, when President Bill Clinton proposed an energy tax in the hope of meeting the goals of the Rio treaty, the A.P.I. invested $1.8 million in a G.C.C. disinformation campaign. Senate Democrats from oil-and-coal states joined Republicans to defeat the tax proposal, which later contributed to the Republicans’ rout of Democrats in the midterm congressional elections in 1994 — the first time the Republican Party had won control of both houses in 40 years
  • The G.C.C. spent $13 million on a single ad campaign intended to weaken support for the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which committed its parties to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by 5 percent relative to 1990 levels. The Senate, which would have had to ratify the agreement, took a pre-emptive vote declaring its opposition; the resolution passed 95-0. There has never been another serious effort to negotiate a binding global climate treaty.
  • . This has made the corporation an especially vulnerable target for the wave of compensatory litigation that began in earnest in the last three years and may last a generation. Tort lawsuits have become possible only in recent years, as scientists have begun more precisely to attribute regional effects to global emission levels. This is one subfield of climate science that has advanced significantly sin
  • Pomerance had not been among the 400 delegates invited to Noordwijk. But together with three young activists — Daniel Becker of the Sierra Club, Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists and Stewart Boyle from Friends of the Earth — he had formed his own impromptu delegation. Their constituency, they liked to say, was the climate itself. Their mission was to pressure the delegates to include in the final conference statement, which would be used as the basis for a global treaty, the target proposed in Toronto: a 20 percent reduction of greenhouse-gas combustion by 2005. It was the only measure that mattered, the amount of emissions reductions, and the Toronto number was the strongest global target yet proposed.
  • The delegations would review the progress made by the I.P.C.C. and decide whether to endorse a framework for a global treaty. There was a general sense among the delegates that they would, at minimum, agree to the target proposed by the host, the Dutch environmental minister, more modest than the Toronto number: a freezing of greenhouse-gas emissions at 1990 levels by 2000. Some believed that if the meeting was a success, it would encourage the I.P.C.C. to accelerate its negotiations and reach a decision about a treaty sooner. But at the very least, the world’s environmental ministers should sign a statement endorsing a hard, binding target of emissions reductions. The mood among the delegates was electric, nearly giddy — after more than a decade of fruitless international meetings, they could finally sign an agreement that meant something.
  • 11. ‘The Skunks at The Garden Party’ November 1989
  • It was nearly freezing — Nov. 6, 1989, on the coast of the North Sea in the Dutch resort town of Noordwijk
  • Losing Earth: The Decade WeAlmost Stopped Climate Change We knew everything we needed to know, and nothing stood in our way. Nothing, that is, except ourselves. A tragedy in two acts. By Nathaniel RichPhotographs and Videos by George Steinmetz AUG. 1, 2018
lilyrashkind

Resources for Talking and Teaching About the School Shooting in Uvalde, Texas - The New... - 0 views

  • Only 11 days ago there was Buffalo, with a man driven by racism gunning down 10 people at a supermarket. The next day another angry man walked into a Presbyterian church in Laguna Woods, Calif., and killed one person and wounded five others. And now, Uvalde, Texas — a repeat of what was once thought unfathomable: the killing of at least 19 elementary school children in second, third and fourth grades.
  • What is it like to be a student in the shadow of this violence? How have repeated mass shootings shaped young people? We invite your students to reflect on these questions in this writing prompt, and post their answers to our forum if they would like to join a public conversation on the topic.To help students think about the issue from different angles, we invite them to read the article “A ‘Mass Shooting Generation’ Cries Out for Change,” which was published in 2018 following the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. Then we ask questions such as:
  • Because The Learning Network is for students 13 and older, most of the resources in this resource focus on understanding this shooting and its implications. The Times has published this age-by-age guide to talking to children about mass shootings. And for parents and teachers of younger students this advice from The Times Parenting section might be helpful:
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  • Think about the lives lost.Think about the teachers.Think about the children.They were family, friends, and loved ones.And a gun killed them all.It was only last week that we posted a similar prompt in response to the racist massacre in Buffalo. Like all of our student forums, this one will be moderated.
  • Students might find their own ways to respond, perhaps through writing or art. It may also be helpful to look at how victims of other tragedies have been memorialized, in ways big and small. For example: The 26 playgrounds built to remember the children of Sandy Hook; the memorial for the Oklahoma City bombing, with its “field of chairs,” including 19 smaller ones for the children who lost their lives; and the New York Times Portraits of Grief series, which profiled those lost in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Here are more examples, from the El Paso Times. In what ways can your students or school respond, individually or collectively?
  • Above all, we want you to know we are listening. If it helps your students to share their thoughts and feelings publicly, we have a space for that. And if teachers or parents have thoughts, ideas, questions, concerns or suggestions, please post them here.
  • The authors of the 2018 Times article described how the Parkland shooting moved students around the country to become more involved in activism. Do you think something similar will happen in the wake of the shooting in Uvalde, Texas? Why or why not? How do you think school shootings are shaping the generation of students who are in school right now?Invite your students to weigh in here.
  • Democrats moved quickly to clear the way for votes on legislation to strengthen background checks for gun purchasers. Republicans, even as they expressed horror about the shooting, did not signal that they would drop their longstanding opposition to gun safety measures. Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas pointed the blame at Uvalde’s lack of mental health care, even though the suspect had no record of problems.
  • Which efforts might be the most effective? Students might also take a look at the forum on guns we posted during the 2016 election as part of our Civil Conversation Challenge in which we invited teenagers to have productive, respectful conversations on several issues dividing Americans. We received more than 700 responses to the questions we posed about gun rights, the Second Amendment and more.
  • This article takes on three of the most prominent rumors that have spread via online platforms such as Twitter, Gab, 4chan and Reddit and explains why they are false. What rumors are your students seeing in their feeds, and what steps can they take to find out the truth? From double-checking via sites like Snopes to learning habits like lateral reading, this article (and related lesson plan) has suggestions.
  • While the town of Uvalde grapples with the aftermath of the shooting, community members, local leaders and organizations have mobilized. Two local funeral homes said in social media posts that they would not charge families of victims for their funeral services. Volunteers have lined up to give blood for the shooting victims.
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N.S.A. Gets More Latitude to Share Intercepted Communications - The New York Times - 0 views

  • In its final days, the Obama administration has expanded the power of the National Security Agency to share globally intercepted personal communications with the government’s 16 other intelligence agencies before applying privacy protections.
  • new rules significantly relax longstanding limits on what the N.S.A. may do with the information gathered by its most powerful surveillance operations
  • the government is reducing the risk that the N.S.A. will fail to recognize that a piece of information would be valuable to another agency, but increasing the risk that officials will see private information about innocent people.
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  • Previously, the N.S.A. filtered information before sharing intercepted communications with another agency, like the C.I.A. or the intelligence branches of the F.B.I. and the Drug Enforcement Administration
  • N.S.A.’s analysts passed on only information they deemed pertinent
  • other intelligence agencies will be able to search directly through raw repositories of communications intercepted by the N.S.A.
  • “This is not expanding the substantive ability of law enforcement to get access to signals intelligence,”
  • “It is simply widening the aperture for a larger number of analysts, who will be bound by the existing rules.”
  • Toomey, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, called the move an erosion of rules intended to protect the privacy of Americans when their messages are caught by the N.S.A.’s powerful global collection methods
  • “Rather than dramatically expanding government access to so much personal data, we need much stronger rules to protect the privacy of Americans,” Mr. Toomey said
  • “Seventeen different government agencies shouldn’t be rooting through Americans’ emails with family members, friends and colleagues, all without ever obtaining a warrant.”
  • Under the new system, agencies will ask the N.S.A. for access to specific surveillance feeds, making the case that they contain information relevant and useful to their missions.
  • The move is part of a broader trend of tearing down bureaucratic barriers to sharing intelligence between agencies that dates back to the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
  • Congress enacted the FISA Amendments Act — which legalized warrantless surveillance on domestic soil so long as the target is a foreigner abroad, even when the target is communicating with an American
  • Among the most important questions left unanswered in February was when analysts would be permitted to use Americans’ names, email addresses or other identifying information to search a 12333 database and pull up any messages to, from or about them that had been collected without a warrant.
  • National security analysts sometimes search that act’s repository for Americans’ information, as do F.B.I. agents working on ordinary criminal cases. Critics call this the “backdoor search loophole,” and some lawmakers want to require a warrant for such searches.
  • However, under the rules, if analysts stumble across evidence that an American has committed any crime, they will send it to the Justice Department.
  • Americans’ information gathered under Order 12333 do not apply to metadata: logs showing who contacted whom, but not what they said.
  • Analysts at the intelligence agencies may study social links between people, in search of hidden associates of known suspects, “without regard to the location or nationality of the communicants.”
Javier E

How Google Dominates Us by James Gleick | The New York Review of Books - 0 views

  • E-mail Single Page Print addthis_pub = 'nybooks'; addthis_logo = 'http://www.nybooks.com/images/logo-150.gif'; addthis_logo_background = 'ffffff'; addthis_logo_color = '666666'; addthis_brand = 'NYRB'; addthis_options = 'favorites, facebook, twitter, tumblr, reddit, digg, stumbleupon, delicious, google, more'; Share (function() { var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0], rdb = document.createElement('script'); rdb.type = 'text/javascript'; rdb.async = true; rdb.src = document.location.protocol + '//www.readability.com/embed.js'; s.parentNode.insertBefore(rdb, s); })(); ← 1 2 3 It does not have to mean “Obey all the laws.” When Google embarked on its program to digitize copyrighted books and copy them onto its servers, it did so in stealth, deceiving publishers with whom it was developing business relationships. Google knew that the copying bordered on illegal. It considered its intentions honorable and the law outmoded.
  • Who, then, judges what is evil? “Evil is what Sergey says is evil,”
  • On all the evidence Google’s founders began with an unusually ethical vision for their unusual company. They believe in information—”universally accessible”—as a force for good in and of itself. They have created and led teams of technologists responsible for a golden decade of genuine innovation. They are visionaries in a time when that word is too cheaply used. Now they are perhaps disinclined to submit to other people’s ethical standards, but that may be just a matter of personality. It is well to remember that the modern corporation is an amoral creature by definition, obliged to its shareholder financiers, not to the public interest.
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  • The rise of social networking upends the equation again. Users of Facebook choose to reveal—even to flaunt—aspects of their private lives, to at least some part of the public world. Which aspects, and which part? On Facebook the user options are notoriously obscure and subject to change, but most users share with “friends” (the word having been captured and drained bloodless). On Twitter, every remark can be seen by the whole world, except for the so-called “direct message,” which former Representative Anthony Weiner tried and failed to employ. Also, the Library of Congress is archiving all tweets, presumably for eternity, a fact that should enter the awareness of teenagers, if not members of Congress.
  • Google+ gives users finer control over what gets shared with whom. Still, one way or another, everything is shared with the company. All the social networks have access to our information and mean to use it. Are they our friends?
  • The company always says users can “opt out” of many of its forms of data collection, which is true, up to a point, for savvy computer users; and the company speaks of privacy in terms of “trade-offs,” to which Vaidhyanathan objects: Privacy is not something that can be counted, divided, or “traded.” It is not a substance or collection of data points. It’s just a word that we clumsily use to stand in for a wide array of values and practices that influence how we manage our reputations in various contexts. There is no formula for assessing it: I can’t give Google three of my privacy points in exchange for 10 percent better service.
  • This seems right to me, if we add that privacy involves not just managing our reputation but protecting the inner life we may not want to share.
Javier E

With Uber, Less Reason to Own a Car - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • if Uber and its ride-sharing competitors succeed, it wouldn’t be a stretch to see many small and midsize cities become transportation nirvanas on the order of Manhattan — places where forgoing car ownership isn’t just an outré lifestyle choice, but the preferred way to live.
  • “In many cities and even suburbs, it’s becoming much easier to organize your life car-free or car-lite,” said David A. King, an assistant professor of urban planning at Columbia University who studies technology and transportation. By car-lite, Dr. King means that instead of having one car for every driver, households can increasingly get by with owning just a single vehicle, thanks in part to tech-enabled services like Uber.
  • car-sharing services like Zipcar and bike-sharing services have already led to a significant net reduction of car ownership among users.
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  • though you may think of taxis as a competitor to subways and buses, several studies have found just the opposite.
  • The richest Americans do use taxis more often than middle-class Americans, but so do the poorest Americans, who rely heavily on taxis for trips that aren’t practical through public transportation — shopping trips that involve heavy parcels that wouldn’t be convenient to take on the bus, say, or a ride back home after a medical procedure.
  • Taxis and other car services are usually seen as the province of the rich, but that’s only partly true, studies show.
  • many taxi trips are “multimodal,” meaning that riders mix taxis with other forms of transportation. For instance, people from other boroughs might get to Manhattan by train, and then use cabs to return home late at night.
  • “The one-way travel of taxis allows people to use transit, share rides and otherwise travel without a car,” the researchers wrote. “In this way taxis act as a complement to these other modes and help discourage auto ownership and use.”
  • There’s only one problem with taxis: In most American cities, Dr. King found, there just aren’t enough of them. Taxi service is generally capped by regulation, and in many cities the number of taxis has not been increased substantially in decades
  • Ride-sharing services solve this problem in two ways. First, they substantially increase the supply of for-hire vehicles on the road, which puts downward pressure on prices. As critics say, Uber and other services do this by essentially evading regulations that cap taxis. This has led to intense skirmishes with regulators
  • But Uber has done more than increase the supply of cars in the taxi market. Thanks to technology, it has also improved their utility and efficiency. By monitoring ridership, Uber can smartly allocate cars in places of high demand, and by connecting with users’ phones, it has automated the paying process. When you’re done with an Uber ride, you just leave the car; there’s no fiddling with a credit card and no tipping. Even better, there’s no parking.
  • Compared with that kind of convenience, a car that you own — which you have to park, fill up, fix, insure, clean and pay for whether you use it or not — begins to seem like kind of a drag.
Javier E

Young Israelis: A Turn to the Right? by Eyal Press | NYRBlog | The New York Review of B... - 0 views

  • E-mail addthis_pub = 'nybooks'; addthis_logo = 'http://www.nybooks.com/images/logo-150.gif'; addthis_logo_background = 'ffffff'; addthis_logo_color = '666666'; addthis_brand = 'NYRB'; addthis_options = 'favorites, facebook, twitter, tumblr, reddit, digg, stumbleupon, delicious, google, more'; Share Print Comments (function() { var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0], rdb = document.createElement('script'); rdb.type = 'text/javascript'; rdb.async = true; rdb.src = document.location.protocol + '//www.readability.com/embed.js'; s.parentNode.insertBefore(rdb, s); })(); Young Israelis: A Turn to the Right? Eyal Press Uriel Sinai/Getty Images Children at the local school in the village of Ghajar, on Israeli-Lebanese border, which was recaptured during the 2006 war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, November 10, 2010 Shortly after the democratic uprising began in Egypt, a group of young Israelis led by freelance journalist Dimi Reider launched Kav Hutz (“Outside Line”), a Hebrew-language blog devoted to covering the events across the border. Unable to enter Egypt on short notice with his Israeli passport—a predicament all Israeli correspondents faced—Reider chronicled the insurrection by posting minute-by-minute updates culled from an array of online sources on the ground: Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Egyptian bloggers. The tone of Reider’s blog was reportorial, but hardly detached. “Good luck,” he wrote on the eve of the huge “Day of Departure” rally in Tahrir Square—a sentiment rarely voiced in Israel’s mainstream media, which stressed the danger of a takeover by the Muslim Brotherhood if the protesters prevailed. By the time Egyptians had succeeded in overthrowing Hosni Mubarak, Kav Hutz was getting up to 12,000 visitors a day and had been singled out in Haaretz for leaving the rest of the Israeli press “in the dust.” As the story suggests, Egypt’s uprising managed to inspire not only countless young Arabs but also some young Israelis. A contributor to +972, an Israel-based online magazine that features commentary and reporting by mostly young progressives—it is named after the area code shared by Israel and the Palestinian territories—Reider was deeply moved by the courage of the protesters in Cairo and dismayed by the patronizing reaction of many Israelis. “The line the establishment took was that it’s all very nice but they’re going to end up like Iran,” he recalls. “I didn’t take that line because I bothered to read stuff by Egyptians and it quickly became apparent that the Muslim Brotherhood was just one player. It also felt distasteful to me to judge the extraordinary risks Egyptians were taking solely by our profit—by how it would affect Israeli security and the policy of a government I don’t support anyway.” For observers troubled by Israel’s alarming recent shift to the right, the emergence of Internet-savvy liberal voices like Reider’s may seem heartening. But while such bloggers appear more capable of reaching a younger demographic than Haaretz—the venerable leftist newspaper whose aging readership seems likely to shrink in the years to come—it’s not clear how many of their contemporaries are listening to them. One reason is apathy. Increasingly cynical about politics and the prospects of peace, not a few young Israelis I’ve met in recent years have told me they’ve stopped following the news. When they go online, it’s to chat with friends, not to check out sites like +972. There are also growing numbers of young Israelis who simply don’t share Reider’s views. Against the 12,000 readers of Kav Hutz were countless others who didn’t question the alarmist tone of their country’s mass-circulation tabloids when the revolt in Egypt began, as NPR discovered when it aired a segment on what Israeli youth thought of the uprising. “For us it is better to have Mubarak,” one young Israeli said. “I kind of feel sad for President Mubarak,” said another. “For the last two or three years, we’ve been seeing a very consistent trend of younger Israelis becoming increasingly right-wing,” Dahlia Scheindlin, a public opinion analyst who also contributes to +972, told me. Last year, Scheindlin carried out a survey on behalf of the Kulanana Shared Citizenship Initiative that showed eroding support for democratic values among Israeli youth, at least insofar as the rights of non-Jews go. One question in the survey asked whether there should be “Equal access to state resources, equal opportunities [for] all citizens.” Among Jewish respondents between the ages of 16-29, a mere 43 percent agreed.
  • In October, a poll conducted by New Wave Research asked, “If Palestinians and Israelis reach an agreement… and the Israeli government brings the agreement to a referendum, would you vote for or against?” Among voters over 55, 61 percent—nearly two out of three—said they would support a deal. Among those younger than 35, it was the opposite: only one in three (37 percent) would vote in favor of an agreement.
  • One reason tolerance may be less widespread among young Israelis is that they rarely interact with Palestinians or Arab-Israelis. “You don’t see Palestinians on the streets of Israel,”
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  • The fact that Palestinians in the Gaza Strip chose in 2006 to elect Hamas, whose Charter cites the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and foresees Israel’s eventual destruction, hasn’t helped matters. Neither has the collapse of the peace process. Israelis in their late teens and twenties barely remember the hope that greeted the signing of the 1993 Oslo Accords. They do have strong memories of the Second Intifada (2000-2005), when a wave of suicide bombings “managed to obliterate any trust the Israelis had in a political settlement,” as the public opinion analysts Jacob Shamir and Khalil Shikaki observe in their recent study of the violence’s impact. That was followed by Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005, which the Israeli right warned would make the country vulnerable and which indeed brought a barrage of Qassam missiles to the border town of Sderot; and the Israeli war with Hezbollah in the summer of 2006, in which more than one hundred Israeli soldiers—many of them young—were killed and hundreds more wounded.
  • the popular tabloids and Israel’s leaders converged around the theme of blaming the unraveling of the peace process on Palestinian intransigence.
  • “Older people remember the years when people actually liked Israel. They’re more likely to view criticism from the outside as a possibly legitimate critique of Israel’s policies. Young people are basically being told, over and over again, that criticism of Israel is de-legitimization of Israel, because they’re anti-Semites.”
  • For years Israelis have complained, not without reason, that textbooks used in Palestinian schools have failed to recognize Israel’s existence or to inculcate open-minded attitudes toward Jews among Arab youth
  • To judge by the petition signed by 472 high school teachers and sent to the Ministry of Education in December, however, some civics instructors are having trouble instilling the values of peace and tolerance in Israeli children. The subject of the petition was the growing prevalence of bigotry among students
  • What the instructor has been hearing from his pupils is, of course, something young Israelis have been hearing more and more from their leaders
  • A striking irony apparent in the survey commissioned by the Kulanana Shared Citizenship Initiative is that young Arabs, who are often portrayed in the Israeli press as implacably hostile to the country’s ideals, support principles such as “mutual respect between all sectors” in higher proportions than their Jewish counterparts (84 versus 75 percent). Significantly more (58 versus 25 percent) also “strongly agree” with Israel’s Declaration of Independence, which states: “All citizens, Jews and Arabs alike, will participate in the life of the state, based on the principle of full, equal citizenship, and appropriate representation in all state institutions.” The country’s founders hoped this language would serve as a set of guiding principles for the state.
  • it does seem ironic that in the Jewish State, which insists on defining itself as the Jewish democratic state and the only democracy in the Middle East, the Arabs are our most democratic citizens.”
Javier E

There's No Such Thing as a Slut - Olga Khazan - The Atlantic - 2 views

  • Tweet // Re-execute when the element gets attached. if (window['gapi'] !== undefined) { window.gapi.plusone.go(); }; More Email Print Lara/Flickr In 2004, two women who were long past college age settled into a dorm room at a large public university in the Midwest. Elizabeth Armstrong, a sociology professor at the University of Michigan, and Laura Hamilton, then a graduate assistant and now a sociology professor at the University of California at Merced, were there to examine the daily lives and attitudes of college students
  • The researchers interviewed the 53 women on their floor every year for five years—from the time they were freshmen through their first year out of college.
  • the researchers also dug into their beliefs about morality—sometimes through direct questions, but often, simply by being present for a late-night squabble or a bashful confession.
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  • All but five or six of the women practiced “slut-shaming,” or denigrating the other women for their loose sexual mores.
  • But they conflated their accusations of “sluttiness” with other, unrelated personality traits, like meanness or unattractiveness. It seems there was no better way to smear a dorm-mate than to suggest she was sexually impure. “If you want to make a young woman feel bad, pulling out the term ‘slut’ is a sure fire way to do it,” Armstrong said. “It’s ‘she isn’t one of us, we don't like her and she's different.’”
  • “The high-status women would literally snub or look through the poorer women,” Armstrong said. “They would blow them off entirely. We spent a lot of time asking who would say hi to who; who would let the door slam in someone's face.” According to Armstrong, one sorority member said, “I only see people who are Greek; I don't know who the other students are. They are like extras.”
  • even though the wealthy and poor women were slut-shamed roughly equally in private, it was mostly only the poor women who faced public slut-shaming. And it only seemed to happen when the poorer women tried to make inroads with the richer ones.
  • more rich women than poor women took part in hook-ups throughout college. The poorer women seemed to notice that their wealthier dorm-mates were more sexual, but felt they couldn’t get away with being similarly libertine.
  • Armstrong divided the cohort in two, with wealthier women in one group and the working-class ones in the other. Each group tended to band together, with the poorer half feeling excluded from Greek life and other high-status social activities.
  • “The term is so vague and slippery that no one knows what a slut was or no one knows what you have to do to be that,” she told me. “It circulated around, though, so everyone could worry about it being attached to them.”
runlai_jiang

Trump Bucks Republican Orthodoxy on Guns - Washington Wire - WSJ - 0 views

  • Photo: iStock/Getty Images By Joshua Jamerson Mar 1, 2018 7:18 am ET 0 COMMENTS Save Article Save Remove View Saved Articles <circ
  • He also dashed conservative hopes that he would support a move now for gun owners who legally carry concealed firearms in one state to carry them in the other 49 states, a long-sought goal of the National Rifle Association.
  • he bucked Republican orthodoxy by suggesting the swift removal of guns from people who are potentially mentally ill,
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  • he continued to seek a legislative response to the deaths of 17 people at a Parkland, Fla., high school two weeks ago
  • His comments came the same day&nbsp;Walmart and Dick’s Sporting Goods–two of the country’s biggest gun sellers–said they both would no longer sell guns to anyone under 21 years old.
  • with Democrats saying they doubted the president’s words would yield immediate results, and several key Republicans saying they remained opposed to the Manchin-Toomey legislation that the president said he favored.&nbsp;
  • Mr. Trump has staked out positions on controversial issues in the past, only to surprise some lawmakers with an apparent change of heart later.
  • &nbsp;For more than 20 years, federal law has effectively halted the government’s ability to research gun violence. Now,&nbsp; a bipartisan group of lawmakers&nbsp;is taking another look at the restrictions…C
  • Hope Hicks, the longtime Trump confidant and White House communications director, is resigning. Ms. Hicks, 29 years old, told the president in recent weeks that she wanted to leave the White House to explore outside opportunities, Rebecca Ballhaus and Peter Nicholas report.
  • The bipartisan legislation would relax dozens of rules for small to medium-size banks, shaking up the banking sector with policy changes that could encourage deal-making and make it easier for banks to exp
  • several banks for information about their relationships with Jared Kushner and his finances, Emily Glazer, Erica Orden a
  • News of federal inquiries concerning Kushner Cos. has emerged in recent months, including by prosecutors at the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn and by the Securities and Exchange Commission report
  • The Pentagon is pushing to make the F-35 combat jet cheaper and will take over some repair work to prevent the world’s most expensive military program from becoming unaffordable.
  •  
    Trump promised to restrict gun purchase but the reliability is still a question mark
malonema1

GOP senator: Trump did not make 's---hole' comment | TheHill - 0 views

  • I’m telling you he did not use that word, George. And I’m telling you it’s a gross misrepresentation. How many times do you want me to say that?” Perdue said after host George Stephanopoulos pressed him for an answer.Perdue was one of several lawmakers participating in a meeting with Trump last week when the president reportedly&nbsp;referred to immigrants from African nations, El Salvador and Haiti as coming from "shithole countries."
  • Trump allies see 's***hole' controversy as overblownTrump allies see 's***hole' controversy as overblownPlay VideoPlayMute0:00/0:43Loaded: 0%0:00Progress: 0%Stream TypeLIVE-0:43&nbsp;SharePlayback Rate1xChaptersChaptersDescriptionsdescriptions off, selectedCaptions
  • "Following comments by the President, I said my piece directly to him yesterday. The President and all those attending the meeting know what I said and how I feel. I've always believed that America is an idea, not defined by its people but by its ideals," Graham said.&nbsp;
brookegoodman

Jeff Bezos made billions by selling stock before Covid collapse | Business | The Guardian - 0 views

  • Millions of people across the world have lost their jobs, and trillions of dollars have been wiped off the value of stock markets.
  • Bezos, 56, benefited this week from the best three-day stock market rally since 1933 helping Amazon’s share price to recover almost all of its losses this month to trade at about $1,920, though that was slightly down on their peak of $2,170 in February. Bezos owns about 12% of Amazon’s shares.
  • There is no suggestion that Bezos acted improperly by selling the shares or that he was acting on non-public information about the impact of the pandemic. But his timing was near-perfect. The share sales, which represented about 3% of his total holding, were much greater than Bezos had made in previous months. The stock sold was as much as he had sold in the previous 12 months, according to analysis by the Wall Street Journal.
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  • In total US executives sold about $9.2bn in shares of the companies they run in the five weeks before the start of the stock market rout. Selling before the 30% collapse in the market saved them from paper loses of $1.9bn.
Javier E

We Cannot "Reopen" America - The Bulwark - 0 views

  • Vegas, Baby
  • Las Vegas will not “reopen” because the city as we knew it in February 2020 is gone.
  • Las Vegas is the 28th-largest metropolitan area in America, home to 2.2 million people. Its main business is gambling-related tourism. The city welcomes roughly 42 million visitors a year who pour $58 billion dollars into the local economy and support 370,000 jobs. Almost 40 percent of the area’s workers are employed in the hospitality industry.
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  • How will the airline industry “come back” when people decide to take flights only for travel that cannot be avoided—and international travel is severely restricted?
  • Getting on an airplane to fly to a city so that you can stay in a hotel, eat in crowded dining rooms, and stand elbow-to-elbow with strangers around a craps table will be far, far down the list of behaviors on which most people are open to taking a risk.
  • If the tourism industry were to only decline by 30 percent in Las Vegas, it would be an utter catastrophe
  • Dinner and a Movie Consider the movie theater.
  • (1) If every theater in America opened tomorrow, what percentage of normal attendance would you see? 70 percent? 50 percent? 30 percent? What would that translate into as a percentage of total revenue decline, once you factor in concession sales? (2) The theatrical exhibition business is such a low-margin industry that even a 30 percent decline in revenues would be enough to push just about every operator in America into bankruptcy.
  • Let’s say you are Disney and you made Black Widow expecting it to open to $130 million dollars, pre-pandemic. Now you think that, at some point in the undetermined future, maybe it will open $70 million. Or possibly $30 million. Are you going to take that sort of chance with this asset? Or would you rather bootstrap the part of your business that looks like the future—meaning, your streaming service—and eschew the theatrical release altogether?
  • we could scan the economic landscape and find existential dislocations pretty much everywhere.
  • Up until this past January, 70,000 people got off an airplane in Las Vegas every single day, mostly to take in the city’s charms. On these flights, passenger seats are roughly 17 inches wide with 31 inches of pitch.
  • How will professional sports—which require thousands of people to be packed into small spaces—play in front of live crowds again? The sports leagues may be able to limp along with only broadcast revenues, but the micro-economies built around stadiums and arenas will not.
  • As teleworking becomes increasingly accepted—or even preferred—the physical office will wane. What happens to commercial real estate?
  • not just a single national lockdown of a country’s population and economy is in store to fend off mass contagion but rather quite possibly a succession of them—not just one mother-of-all-economic-shocks but an ongoing crisis that presses economic performance severely in countries all around the world simultaneously.
  • the American economy is a tightly integrated system where disruption in one sector can cascade into failures everywhere else. In the last 50 years we’ve seen how shocks to finance or energy were sufficient to throw the entire country into deep recessions.
  • Exactly what sort of recession should we be expecting when several sectors are pushed toward extinction, all at once?
  • Here in the United States, we watch, week by week, as highly regarded financial analysts from Wall Street and economists from the academy misestimate the depths of the damage we can expect—always erring on the side of optimism.
  • After the March lockdown of the country to “flatten the curve,” the boldest voices dared to venture that the United States might hit 10% unemployment before the worst was over
  • our weekly jobless claims reports and 22 million unemployment insurance applications later, U.S. unemployment is already above the 15% mark: north of 1931 levels, in other words. By the end of April, we could well reach or break the 20% threshold, bringing us to 1935 levels, and 1933 levels (25%) no longer sound fantastical
  • Even so, political and financial leaders talk of a rapid “V-shaped recovery” commencing in the summer, bringing us back to economic normalcy within months. This is prewar thinking, and it is looking increasingly like the economic equivalent of talk in earlier times about how “the boys will be home by Christmas.” . . .
  • The Long War
  • yes, there will eventually be creative destruction that spurs innovation and increasing economic activity. But that is in the long run.
  • The reality of our near- and medium-term future is something very different. And whatever the government orders people to do, that reality will look more like our “stay-at-home” present than the pre-virus past.
  • he movement to “reopen” America is a fallacy based on a fantasy. The fallacy is the notion that lifting stay-at-home orders will result in people going back to their normal routines. This is false.
  • Share via email Print
  • the sooner people grasp how completely and fundamentally the world has changed, the faster we’ll be able to adapt to this new reality. Let’s take a close look at just a couple of examples.
izzerios

How US leaks upset two allies in one week - CNNPolitics.com - 1 views

shared by izzerios on 25 May 17 - No Cached
  • With multiple high-profile intelligence leaks in recent weeks, the US has now managed to upset two of its closest allies by allowing the disclosure of sensitive information
  • Trump was reported to have revealed highly sensitive, likely Israeli-shared intelligence to Russian officials in the Oval Office, the United Kingdom is voicing its frustration over leaked information coming from US sources.
  • President reportedly sharing sensitive information with a foreign power in one instance and US law enforcement sources providing information to the media in the other
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  • UK Home Secretary Amber Rudd slammed US leaks on the investigation into the attack at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England, as "irritating" on Wednesday after a string of details emerged from US law enforcement sources before they were released by British police or officials
  • The White House did not immediately respond to CNN's request for comment on Rudd's remarks
  • was greeted warmly by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who showed no indication that Trump's interaction with the Russians posed a problem between the two nations.
  • the leaking of the suspect's name was more disruptive because it might have tipped off other suspects,"
  • "We've got a very close intelligence and defense partnership with the UK, and that news ... suggests that we have even more close allies who are questioning whether we can be trusted with vital intelligence," Sen. Chris Coons, D-Delaware
  • Aaron David Miller, a former adviser to Democratic and Republican secretaries of state, who added that the leaks may reflect a lack of structure within the Trump administration itself.
  • "I will make clear to President Trump that intelligence that is shared between our law enforcement agencies must remain secure," she said following a cabinet-level security meeting.
  • Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman insisted there would be no effect on the close relations between the United States and Israel due to the apparent leak
  • "The intel community is probably beside themselves and worried about what they can confide now, if the President is going to be as careless as he was," Miller said
  • "If we will assess that our sources of intelligence are in danger due to the way it will be handled by the United States, then we will have to keep the very sensitive information close to our chests," Yatom
  • "You are not going to have the best capabilities to defend the nation if other countries aren't going to share as much with you."
  • Stern words will likely be directed to the US side, he said, but "on balance, it's probably not going to change intelligence-sharing arrangements all that much."
proudsa

Even Trump Voters Hate This Bill He Just Signed | The Huffington Post - 0 views

  • Republicans&nbsp;pushed through the resolution&nbsp;last month that overturns Obama administration rules banning internet service providers, or ISPs, from&nbsp;sharing or selling&nbsp;“sensitive” data, like web browsing history and Social Security numbers, without customers’ explicit permission.
    • proudsa
       
      why?
  • 83 percent oppose the concept, according to the&nbsp;HuffPost/YouGov&nbsp;poll
    • proudsa
       
      How reliable is a poll taken by an organization with a clear political leaning (biased readership?)
  • Polarization being what it is, it’s rare for&nbsp;any&nbsp;political issue to face such an overwhelming rejection.
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  • Seventy-four percent of the public—including three-quarters of Republicans—said that Trump should veto the bill, with just 11 percent advocating for him to sign it.
Javier E

Opinion | How to Destroy Truth - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Great nations thrive by constantly refreshing two great reservoirs of knowledge
  • The first contains the knowledge from the stories we tell about ourselves.
  • This is the knowledge of who we are as a people, how we got here, what long conflicts bind us together, what we find admirable and dishonorable, what kind of world we hope to build together.
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  • This kind of knowledge isn’t merely factual knowledge. It is a moral framework from which to see the world. Homer taught the ancient Greeks how to perceive their reality. Exodus teaches the Jews how to interpret their struggles and their journey.
  • This emotional and moral knowledge should give us a sense of identity, a sense of ideals to live up to and an appreciation of the values that matter most to us — equality or prosperity or freedom.
  • these are shared stories; this shared knowledge should help us discover a shared destiny and our shared affection for one another.
  • The second reservoir of knowledge is propositional knowledge.
  • This is the kind of knowledge we acquire through reason, logical proof and tight analysis. Some of this knowledge is empirical knowledge that can be established by carefully using evidence.
  • Some of this knowledge is contained in powerful ideas that can be debated: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
  • the acquisition of this kind of knowledge is also a collective process.
  • It’s not just a group of people commenting on each other’s internet posts. It’s a network of institutions — universities, courts, publishers, professional societies, media outlets — that have set up an interlocking set of procedures to hunt for error, weigh evidence and determine which propositions pass muster.
  • An individual may be dumb, Rauch notes, but the whole network is brilliant, so long as everybody in it adheres to certain rules: No one gets the final say (every proposition might be wrong). No claim to personal authority (who you are doesn’t determine the truth of what you say, the evidence does). No retreat to safety (you can’t ban an idea just because it makes you feel unsafe).
  • These are the same principles as those of the scientific method
  • The collapse of trust, the rise of animosity — these are emotional, not intellectual problems
  • The real problem is in our system of producing shared stories. If a country can’t tell narratives in which everybody finds an honorable place, then righteous rage will drive people toward tribal narratives that tear it apart.
  • But the core problem is our failure to understand what education is
  • Once you realize that people are primarily desiring creatures, not rational creatures, you realize that one of the great projects of schooling and culture is to educate the passions.
  • It is to help people learn to feel the proper kind of outrage at injustice, the proper form of reverence before sacrifice, the proper swelling of civic pride, the proper affection for our fellows.
  • This knowledge is conveyed not through facts but through emotional experiences — stories.
  • Over the past decades, we cut education in half. We focused on reason and critical thinking skills — the core of the second reservoir of knowledge.
  • The ability to tell complex stories about ourselves has atrophied. This is the ability to tell stories in which opposing characters can each possess pieces of the truth,
  • stories in which all characters are embedded in time, at one point in their process of growth, stories rooted in the complexity of real life and not the dogma of ideological abstraction.
  • Now as we watch state legislatures try to enforce what history gets taught and not taught, as we watch partisans introduce ideological curriculums, we see how debauched and brutalized our historical storytelling skills have become.
Javier E

Here's a Look Inside Facebook's Data Wars - The New York Times - 0 views

  • On one side were executives, including Mr. Silverman and Brian Boland, a Facebook vice president in charge of partnerships strategy, who argued that Facebook should publicly share as much information as possible about what happens on its platform — good, bad or ugly.
  • On the other side were executives, including the company’s chief marketing officer and vice president of analytics, Alex Schultz, who worried that Facebook was already giving away too much.
  • One day in April, the people behind CrowdTangle, a data analytics tool owned by Facebook, learned that transparency had limits.
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  • They argued that journalists and researchers were using CrowdTangle, a kind of turbocharged search engine that allows users to analyze Facebook trends and measure post performance, to dig up information they considered unhelpful — showing, for example, that right-wing commentators like Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino were getting much more engagement on their Facebook pages than mainstream news outlets.
  • These executives argued that Facebook should selectively disclose its own data in the form of carefully curated reports, rather than handing outsiders the tools to discover it themselves.Team Selective Disclosure won, and CrowdTangle and its supporters lost.
  • the CrowdTangle story is important, because it illustrates the way that Facebook’s obsession with managing its reputation often gets in the way of its attempts to clean up its platform
  • The company, blamed for everything from election interference to vaccine hesitancy, badly wants to rebuild trust with a skeptical public. But the more it shares about what happens on its platform, the more it risks exposing uncomfortable truths that could further damage its image.
  • Facebook’s executives were more worried about fixing the perception that Facebook was amplifying harmful content than figuring out whether it actually was amplifying harmful content. Transparency, they said, ultimately took a back seat to image management.
  • the executives who pushed hardest for transparency appear to have been sidelined. Mr. Silverman, CrowdTangle’s co-founder and chief executive, has been taking time off and no longer has a clearly defined role at the company, several people with knowledge of the situation said. (Mr. Silverman declined to comment about his status.) And Mr. Boland, who spent 11 years at Facebook, left the company in November.
  • “One of the main reasons that I left Facebook is that the most senior leadership in the company does not want to invest in understanding the impact of its core products,” Mr. Boland said, in his first interview since departing. “And it doesn’t want to make the data available for others to do the hard work and hold them accountable.”
  • Mr. Boland, who oversaw CrowdTangle as well as other Facebook transparency efforts, said the tool fell out of favor with influential Facebook executives around the time of last year’s presidential election, when journalists and researchers used it to show that pro-Trump commentators were spreading misinformation and hyperpartisan commentary with stunning success.
  • “People were enthusiastic about the transparency CrowdTangle provided until it became a problem and created press cycles Facebook didn’t like,” he said. “Then, the tone at the executive level changed.”
  • Facebook was happy that I and other journalists were finding its tool useful. With only about 25,000 users, CrowdTangle is one of Facebook’s smallest products, but it has become a valuable resource for power users including global health organizations, election officials and digital marketers, and it has made Facebook look transparent compared with rival platforms like YouTube and TikTok, which don’t release nearly as much data.
  • Last fall, the leaderboard was full of posts by Mr. Trump and pro-Trump media personalities. Since Mr. Trump was barred from Facebook in January, it has been dominated by a handful of right-wing polemicists like Mr. Shapiro, Mr. Bongino and Sean Hannity, with the occasional mainstream news article, cute animal story or K-pop fan blog sprinkled in.
  • But the mood shifted last year when I started a Twitter account called @FacebooksTop10, on which I posted a daily leaderboard showing the sources of the most-engaged link posts by U.S. pages, based on CrowdTangle data.
  • The account went semi-viral, racking up more than 35,000 followers. Thousands of people retweeted the lists, including conservatives who were happy to see pro-Trump pundits beating the mainstream media and liberals who shared them with jokes like “Look at all this conservative censorship!” (If you’ve been under a rock for the past two years, conservatives in the United States frequently complain that Facebook is censoring them.)
  • Inside Facebook, the account drove executives crazy. Some believed that the data was being misconstrued and worried that it was painting Facebook as a far-right echo chamber. Others worried that the lists might spook investors by suggesting that Facebook’s U.S. user base was getting older and more conservative. Every time a tweet went viral, I got grumpy calls from Facebook executives who were embarrassed by the disparity between what they thought Facebook was — a clean, well-lit public square where civility and tolerance reign — and the image they saw reflected in the Twitter lists.
  • Mr. Boland, the former Facebook vice president, said that was a convenient deflection. He said that in internal discussions, Facebook executives were less concerned about the accuracy of the data than about the image of Facebook it presented.“It told a story they didn’t like,” he said of the Twitter account, “and frankly didn’t want to admit was true.”
  • Several executives proposed making reach data public on CrowdTangle, in hopes that reporters would cite that data instead of the engagement data they thought made Facebook look bad.But Mr. Silverman, CrowdTangle’s chief executive, replied in an email that the CrowdTangle team had already tested a feature to do that and found problems with it. One issue was that false and misleading news stories also rose to the top of those lists.“Reach leaderboard isn’t a total win from a comms point of view,” Mr. Silverman wrote.
  • executives argued that my Top 10 lists were misleading. They said CrowdTangle measured only “engagement,” while the true measure of Facebook popularity would be based on “reach,” or the number of people who actually see a given post. (With the exception of video views, reach data isn’t public, and only Facebook employees and page owners have access to it.)
  • Mr. Schultz, Facebook’s chief marketing officer, had the dimmest view of CrowdTangle. He wrote that he thought “the only way to avoid stories like this” would be for Facebook to publish its own reports about the most popular content on its platform, rather than releasing data through CrowdTangle.“If we go down the route of just offering more self-service data you will get different, exciting, negative stories in my opinion,” he wrote.
  • there’s a problem with reach data: Most of it is inaccessible and can’t be vetted or fact-checked by outsiders. We simply have to trust that Facebook’s own, private data tells a story that’s very different from the data it shares with the public.
  • Mr. Zuckerberg is right about one thing: Facebook is not a giant right-wing echo chamber.But it does contain a giant right-wing echo chamber — a kind of AM talk radio built into the heart of Facebook’s news ecosystem, with a hyper-engaged audience of loyal partisans who love liking, sharing and clicking on posts from right-wing pages, many of which have gotten good at serving up Facebook-optimized outrage bait at a consistent clip.
  • CrowdTangle’s data made this echo chamber easier for outsiders to see and quantify. But it didn’t create it, or give it the tools it needed to grow — Facebook did — and blaming a data tool for these revelations makes no more sense than blaming a thermometer for bad weather.
  • It’s worth noting that these transparency efforts are voluntary, and could disappear at any time. There are no regulations that require Facebook or any other social media companies to reveal what content performs well on their platforms, and American politicians appear to be more interested in fighting over claims of censorship than getting access to better data.
  • It’s also worth noting that Facebook can turn down the outrage dials and show its users calmer, less divisive news any time it wants. (In fact, it briefly did so after the 2020 election, when it worried that election-related misinformation could spiral into mass violence.) And there is some evidence that it is at least considering more permanent changes.
  • The project, which some employees refer to as the “Top 10” project, is still underway, the people said, and it’s unclear whether its findings have been put in place. Mr. Osborne, the Facebook spokesman, said that the team looks at a variety of ranking changes, and that the experiment wasn’t driven by a desire to change the Top 10 lists.
  • This year, Mr. Hegeman, the executive in charge of Facebook’s news feed, asked a team to figure out how tweaking certain variables in the core news feed ranking algorithm would change the resulting Top 10 lists, according to two people with knowledge of the project.
  • As for CrowdTangle, the tool is still available, and Facebook is not expected to cut off access to journalists and researchers in the short term, according to two people with knowledge of the company’s plans.
  • Mr. Boland, however, said he wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook executives decided to kill off CrowdTangle entirely or starve it of resources, rather than dealing with the headaches its data creates.
Javier E

Billionaire Chuck Feeney achieves goal of giving away his fortune | Retail industry | T... - 0 views

  • 1,1831183Chuck Feeney has achieved his lifetime ambition: giving away his $8bn (£6bn) fortune while he is still around to see the impact it has made.
  • For the past 38 years, Feeney, an Irish American who made billions from a duty-free shopping empire, has been making endowments to charities and universities across the world with the goal of “striving for zero … to give it all away”
  • This week Feeney, 89, achieved his goal.
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  • As he signed papers to formally dissolve the foundation, Feeney, who is in poor health, said he was very satisfied with “completing this on my watch”.
  • From his small rented apartment in San Francisco, he had a message for other members of the super-rich, who may have pledged to give away part of their fortunes but only after they have died: “To those wondering about Giving While Living: try it, you’ll like it.”
  • Feeney, who gave most of his money away in secret, said he hoped more billionaires would follow his example and use their money to help address the world’s biggest problems.
  • “Wealth brings responsibility,” he often said. “People must define themselves, or feel a responsibility to use some of their assets to improve the lives of their fellow humans, or else create intractable problems for future generations.”
  • Oeschsli said Feeney would not criticise other people for not giving more “but he would be dumbfounded – what is all that wealth about if you’re not going to do good with it?”
  • he would scratch his head and say ‘how many yachts or pairs of shoes do you need? What is it all this wealth accumulation about, when you can look about you and see such tremendous needs’.”
  • “I have always empathised with people who have it tough in life,” Feeney said in a rare interview with Ireland’s RTE in 2010. “And the world is full of people who don’t get enough to eat.”
  • Feeney has lived a remarkably frugal lifestyle, not owning a car or home, and only one pair of shoes. He was known for flying only in economy class, even when members of his family and colleagues would travel in business class on the same plane.
  • The stories of his frugality are true: he does have a $10 Casio watch and carry his papers in a plastic bag. That is him. That’s what he felt comfortable with, and that’s really who Chuck has been.”
  • Feeney has given more than $3.7bn to higher education institutions, including almost $1bn to Cornell University, where he studied hotel administration for free under the GI bill after service as a US air force radio operator during the Korean war
  • eeney has also donated $870m to human rights groups (including $62m in grants to groups campaigning to end the death penalty in the US, and $76m to grassroots campaigns supporting the passage of Obamacare.)
  • The son of immigrants from County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, he has also donated $1.9bn to projects in the country, as well as the Republic, where he was instrumental in the founding of the University of Limerick. He also helped behind the scenes during the peace process.
  • Gates credited Feeney with creating a path for other philanthropists to follow. “I remember meeting him before starting the Giving Pledge,” Gates said. “He told me we should encourage people not to give just 50% but as much as possible during their lifetime. No one is a better example of that than Chuck. Many people talk to me about how he inspired them. It is truly amazing.”
  • Buffett described Feeney as “my hero and Bill Gates’ hero – he should be everybody’s hero”.
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